Skip to main content

GeoFencing meets Indoor Location

We've written a lot about indoor location positioning technology.  At last count it's being researched by several dozen major mobile companies and developed by almost forty start-up companies.  We've blogged about systems from Nokia, SenionLab, Meridian, Pole Star and others.  The technologies for indoor location positioning include Wi-Fi fingerprinting, sensor fusion, Wi-Fi network-centric tracking, dedicated Bluetooth beacons, hybrid approaches, and more.  The field is exploding.

We've also written recently about GeoFencing.  GeoFencing enables an action to be taken when a device enters or leaves a specific geographical area.  Our recently released report on GeoFencing includes 145 pages of details of R&D by all the major mobile companies and a growing number of start-ups.

Today these two hot areas, Indoor Location and GeoFencing, meet each other, in the form of SenseWhere's GeoWhere.  GeoWhere uses SenseWhere's indoor positioning technology to track people through GeoFences both indoors and outdoors. GeoWhere was just announced, and we expect to see it deployed in the market soon.

GeoWhere's GeoFences are aimed to be used for mobile advertising, friend-finding, content pushing, child monitoring, in-app notifications, SMS and e-mail sending, and more.  GeoFences can be defined both on the web and on mobile devices, both indoors and outdoors.  GeoWhere can be used to remind phone users when they're passing a drugstore, to notify parents when children are leaving their school, to display promotions to customers walking by a store in a mall, to monitor the locations of elderly people moving around an assisted living area, and much more.

As the company writes:  "The solution is equipped with a range of features including integration with mobile advertising and marketing platforms, customisable indoor maps, configurable settings for specific people or groups including friends/family and settings for hybrid areas exploiting SenseWhere's positioning accuracy. A specific Geo-Fence could also be activated within specific times and trigger notifications and messages which can be sent as email, SMS text message and in app notification messages. The GeoWhere platform also addresses fundamental issues such as mobile device battery efficiency while providing precise positioning through the use of SenseWhere's propriety technology."

While SenseWhere is not releasing an end-user app right now, they're releasing a highly scalable platform that can be deployed by telecom operators and other big players.  There are reportedly some huge companies working on services based on their platform, to be announced soon.

GeoFencing and Indoor Location Positioning are truly "two great tastes that taste great together."  Each one complements the other: Indoor positioning makes GeoFencing pervasive, and GeoFencing makes indoor location applications more straightforward to implement usefully.

We look forward to SenseWhere's GeoWhere, and other systems that integrate these two technology areas, bringing useful apps and services to market.

Want to know more about GeoFencing technology and Indoor Location Positioning technology?  Check out the Grizzly Analytics in-depth reports on mobile industry R&D in Indoor Location Positioning and GeoFencing.  Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Popular posts from this blog

33 Indoor Location Related Start-up Acquisitions

  Acquisitions Continue in the Indoor Location Industry; Grizzly Analytics Shows Price Growth at the High End and Continuity at the Low End New York, NY, February 22, 2021 - Despite the recent pandemic, M&A deals in the indoor location area have maintained a steady pace of 4-5 deals a year. At the high end of the spectrum, prices have increased to up to $400 Million for the highest priced recent deal and $165 Million for the second highest. At the lower end, many earlier stage companies have been acquired in the $2-3 Million range. A newly updated report from Grizzly Analytics gives prices and strategic details for 33 acquisitions in the indoor location area.  While the highest priced indoor location acquisitions have historically involved chip-based technologies, recent acquisitions have been more varied. “A few years ago the focus of indoor location M&A was all around pure localization technologies. The biggest deal to date is in fact for a chip-based localization ...
Read more

Adding real value to smartphone camera pictures

Most technology features follow a similar path, from imitation to improvement to transformation.  First they imitate something that came before, like telephones imitating the telegraphs of yesteryear.  Then they improve on them, like phones entering individual homes. Then they transform the entire endeavor, completely surpassing the previous technology, like phones automatically connecting people without operator involvement, which enabled society to communicate in ways that telegraph users never contemplated. Cellphone cameras are following a similar path.  At the beginning cellphone cameras were imitating digital cameras, adding the convenience of carrying only one device but basically doing the same as digital cameras did.  Then they improved on them, both with quality improvements and with the ability to share pictures wirelessly without wiring the phone to a computer.  The ability to instantly share and synchronize pictures from a phone is somewhat transf...
Read more

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...
Read more