An ace up Google's sleeve in Bluetooth-based Indoor Positioning?

Everyone's talking these days about Google's new indoor mapping, which they say will track a cellphone's location as a person walks around a mall or airport. This would obviously be a huge breakthrough, now that everyone's gotten used to using cellphones for navigation and location services, and would naturally like to keep doing so while walking around a mall.

Nokia just counter-attacked with an update on their own indoor navigation research, which uses Bluetooth-based "beacons" to improve indoor positioning. Of course, this research isn't new, it's a continuation of work at Nokia that dates back several years. But the new announcement places this new capability in the context of new Windows-based smartphones.

Of course, there are dozens of companies working on indoor positioning. Grizzly Analytics reported many of these in our report on next-generation location services, and we'll soon have an updated report out on indoor location positioning which analyzes research by Google, Nokia, RIM, Qualcomm, Samsung and many more.

In the meantime, here's a fun fact that nobody has reported in the recent flurry of articles on the race between Nokia and Google to indoor location services: Who do you think holds a granted U.S. patent on using Bluetooth for indoor positioning?

Google.

A U.S. patent titled Location determination for mobile units was granted back in 2004 to Motorola. It discussed, in terminology that feels outdated this many years later, using fixed Bluetooth devices with known locations to track mobile devices that are also Bluetooth-equipped.

Yep, that's the same as using beacons to position smartphones.

This patent is presumably soon to be owned by Google, with their acquisition of Motorola Mobility and their huge patent portfolio.

Of course, there are many differences between the methods discussed in this patent and Nokia's research. Motorola's method did the computation in the cloud, while Nokia's looking at location determination on the handset. And Nokia's looking at more sophisticated algorithms for triangulation and positioning.

But it's fascinating nonetheless that Nokia's big announcement of Bluetooth-based positioning, that they and everyone thought (with justification) would differentiate them strongly from Google's approach, would step right into the area of a Google-owned patent.

Want to learn more about research underway at a wide variety of companies in the area of indoor positioning? Check back soon for an up-to-date and insightful report on the subject from Grizzly Analytics.

Sensor-fusion indoor location system in over 30 malls in Singapore

SingTel just deployed indoor mapping and navigation from Swedish start-up SenionLab in over 30 shopping malls in Singapore, with 20 more in planning, in the biggest single deployment we've seen yet of customized indoor location technology. The most significant aspect of this deployment is that this is one of the first commercial deployments of indoor location technology that uses a new technology approach called "sensor fusion," which uses sensors in smartphones (gyroscope, compass, accelerometer, ...) to track location by sensing the phone's movements. Most indoor location systems determine location by measuring the signals of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots or cellular antennas, but this risks looking choppy as the phone waits for the radio signals to change to detect the next place it is. Sensing motion using phone sensors makes the system work more smoothly, regardless of radio signal details. (The SenionLab solution does use Wi-Fi signals as well, to compe...

See great indoor location tech from the 2017 testbed

The videos from the Indoor Location Testbed at GeoIoT World 2017 are now released! Here is your chance to see how these solutions performed in our real-world evaluation, in the videos below. The testbed evaluated each solution by walking around a real-world venue, the GeoIoT World 2017 conference, measuring performance at 10 pre-selected points. Click here for the testbed report, which analyzes each solution's performance in a wide variety of metrics, including real-time accuracy, accuracy stabilization, consistency, latency, floor change, first fix, setup time & more. Let's start with BlooLoc's tag-based solution, which achieved accuracy under 2m in real-time and under 1.5m after stabilization: Then let's look at the infrastructure-free solution from GipsTech , which achieved accuracy under 2m without using any beacons or radio signals: Next is GipsTech's solution with BLE added: Next is BlooLoc's phone-based solution: Fin...

Quuppa - The newest and oldest in indoor location positioning

Word is starting to get out about Quuppa , a company formed in September 2012 that's developing very high accuracy indoor positioning technology (HAIP). To Quuppa, "high accuracy" means roughly 20cm. Yes, 20cm. 8 inches. That's an order of magnitude better than the 4-5m accuracy that other start-ups are bringing to market, and two orders of magnitude better than the 15-20m accuracy that mass-market approaches like Google's are delivering. Update March 2015: See here for more up-to-date information on Quuppa. As of now this high level of accuracy is available only for tracking dedicated tags. It won't be available for cellphones until some new Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) features become standard. (On cellphones they're working on other good, but not quite as accurate, positioning.) But check out their demonstration - in this game of basketball, the players have tags on their shoes, and the ball has a tag inside. Pretty amazing for a company fou...

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