Broadcom licenses metro indoor technology from NextNav

Chip maker Broadcom just announced that they are licensing metropolitan indoor location technology from USA-based NextNav.

NextNav, one of over 50 companies developing technology for indoor location positioning, has developed unique technology for enabling indoor positioning in metropolitan and urban settings. Their radio beacons are deployed throughout cities, and their signals can penetrate buildings and enable indoor positioning in places that GPS can't reach. Because they are deploying their beacons throughout cities, they have much broader coverage than Wi-Fi or BLE based approaches. They offer positioning in 3 dimensions, including altitude.

The press releases indicate that Broadcom is buying a commercial license to NextNav's technology, enabling them to add support for NextNav beacons to their chips, but are not acquiring the company itself.

Broadcom already offers chips that support a wide variety of indoor location positioning technologies, including W-Fi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy, and MEMS-based sensor fusion (inertial navigation). This picture is from a demo that Grizzly Analytics saw 7 months ago at the MWC conference - the black device on the wall in the upper right is a beacon that their device was using (along with MEMS sensors) to determine positioning on the map. But these beacons, using BLE or other technologies, only reach within a short radius, and cannot offer the city-wide coverage that NextNav is envisioning.

Will Broadcom chips soon offer support for NextNav's Metropolitan Beacon technology? Is this a vote of confidence in NextNav's deployment? Will NextNav's technology be deployed in enough cities for this to give Broadcom an edge? Only time will tell. But the indoor location arena is continuing to heat up, and develop in new and interesting directions.....

The year indoor location will truly take off

For years I've been writing sentences like "this will be the year that indoor location will explode into the market." I, and many others, have been expecting indoor location technology to enable the huge range of location-enabled apps, which currently work only outside where GPS signals are available, to work inside. But until now the promise of indoor location has remained a promise. But if we look at the reasons for this, we'll see that it is about to change. 2017 and 2018 are poised to be the years that the challenges keeping indoor location from going mainstream will be solved. First is accuracy. Most indoor location technologies until a year or so ago had accuracy in the range of 4 to 8 meters. This sounds good in principle, and in fact is better than GPS in many cases. But GPS systems are able to use road details to hide their inaccuracies, so that the blue dot seems to follow your driving car almost perfectly. But indoors, this sort of inaccuracy means y

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-

Robot Camera Foreshadows an Era of Location-Aware Electronics

A French company called Move 'N See produces a line of camera robots. Their devices act as a smart tripod, holding a video camera and automatically moving and zooming the camera as people of interest move around a site. The idea is simple but amazingly innovative. Photo selfies are easy to take, but video selfies are next to impossible. How can I video myself playing football or doing gymnastics, without setting the camera so far back as to be useless? Do spectators want to spend an entire sporting event carefully videoing their friend or relative moving around the field? Enter Move 'N See's "personal robot cameramen." Their devices aim, pan and zoom a video camera as one or more people move around an area. The people of interest wear armbands whose locations are tracked, enabling the camera controller to know where to aim the camera. The camera controller also includes enough smarts to adjust the camera smoothly and to capture multiple people evenly. T

Grizzly Analytics Blog

Search This Blog