HP acquires Aruba, focus on indoor location tech

Wow. What does it mean when a giant company like HP acquires networking giant Aruba, and the 3rd paragraph of the Forbes article on the subject discusses indoor location technology:

With Aruba Networks contributing roughly $800 million to $1 billion in wireless revenue, the acquisition would only a small increase to the new HP Enterprise company’s revenue base. However, it would bolster HP’s overall networking market share and provide a newer platform to support the best wave of mobility services. Aruba made several important acquisitions over the past two years that has positioned the company to support the future of WLAN growth. It acquired Meridian in 2013. Meridian uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate but also offers tools to build apps for businesses that want location-awareness as part of their mobile offering... This market is different from simply delivering connectivity. It delivers indoor location services and supports contextual identity based on the person, the device, the location and the type of traffic.

Indoor location technology is clearly on the radar screen of giants, as much as Aruba's $1B in revenue and their huge market share.

You can read more about Meridian's indoor location technology here, and about Aruba's acquisition of Meridian here. Aruba has added new beacon technology to the Meridian base since those articles were written. Interestingly, HP themselves revealed some R&D recently on network-based indoor location technology. Details of the latest technology from Aruba, Meridian and HP is profiled in the recently updated report on indoor location technology.

Looks like indoor location technology is gaining in significance every day!

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware.

The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies, released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption.

Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-3 meter …

Ultra-Wideband Poised to Enter Smartphones

Recent years have seen a constant increase in the speed at which software innovations reach market. One day’s new concept can be the next day’s innovative mobile application, the following day’s ten competing mobile applications, and the day after that’s built-in phone feature.
In hardware, however, innovation tends to go slower. Addition of new hardware chips or components to smartphones, for example, are a constant worry for smartphone manufacturers, who need to be 100% certain that the new innovation won’t in some way hurt the other functions and components of the phone.
Does adding a new chip affect in any way the electrical signals between the other chips? Does a new wireless component affect the radio waves of the core phone or wireless components? Do signals to or from a new antenna hurt the performance of other antennas in the device?
Early cellphones and smartphones often had concerns of this sort. Some early smartphones did not include vibrate-mode because the shaking int…

33 Indoor Location Technologies at Mobile World Congress 2017

The number of companies exhibiting indoor location technologies at the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC) skyrocketed to 33!

Before MWC started, we released our Guide to Indoor Location at MWC, with 23 companies:

During the conference we notified our guide recipients of 10 other indoor location exhibitors that we saw. (Sign up here to receive our guide and to be on our mailing list for next year's MWC.)

This is many more indoor location related exhibits that previous years. The area is growing by leaps and bounds! Our recent report on indoor location technologies analyzed and profiled almost 200 companies!

Here are some videos, so you can see the technologies in action, followed by a list of the other indoor location companies that were at MWC.

First up is Philips Lighting, with high-accuracy indoor location positioning based on LED light modulation and visible light communication (VLC) technology:

Next comes Estimote, makers of Bluetooth (BLE) beacons, who introduced self-mapping b…

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