Grizzly Analytics Blog

Wireless Lighting. Smart lighting. These are phrases that are starting to reach market, at least among early adopters. To some it sounds like the obvious next thing. To others it sounds like techies making simple things complicated.  It’s certainly a new and growing trend, with several start-up companies and projects in the area, and some major electronics companies joining the fray. “Wireless lighting” refers to systems in which individual bulbs can be controlled wirelessly. “Smart lighting” refers to systems in which individual bulbs can be controlled intelligently by a computerized control unit. In many systems the two are combined, with a computer controlling the light bulbs intelligently and wirelessly, and the terms are often used interchangeably. Is smart wireless lighting the wave of the future, or a silly use of technology for no good purpose? Looking at some of the start-ups in the area gives credence to the cynics. One project , for example, promotes the abi...

The acquisition of an early stage Israeli start-up company, KitLocate, by Russian Internet giant Yandex ( YNDX ), was treated as yet another small M&A in the press. Many articles reported the acquisition, summarized KitLocate 's technology for reducing the power consumption of GPS-based mobile applications, mentioned that Yandex is maintaining the KitLocate office as an Israeli R&D center, and then moved to the next topic. Yet another acquisition. But the implications of this acquisition are in fact much greater. Yandex's adoption and promotion of KitLocate's technology is ushering in an era in which mobile location-based services are pervasive, meaning that instead of being turn-on-turn-off, they are always on. This has huge implications for mobile technology and related M&A.... See the full article on SeekingAlpha:  Yandex's Acquisition Of KitLocate Foreshadows An Era Of Pervasive Location Services http://seekingalpha.com/article/2117603-yandexs-acqu...

Catching up on some of the great technology I saw at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC) one month ago, here's a video of Broadcom's indoor location positioning technology demo. Broadcom makes chips, and this demo shows one of their chips tracking the location of a phone as it moves around. UPDATED: The Samsung phone shown here is a Samsung Galaxy S4 that contains a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip, running special software to interact with a Broadcom chip inside the Wi-Fi access points used in the demo, which are also running special software inside. More on this below. Broadcom's location positioning, in this demo, is based on a technique called Wi-Fi trilateration. This means that the phone starts with a database of locations of Wi-Fi access points, and calculates its own location based on the distances that it computes from each nearby access point.  Broadcom's primary innovation here is that the trilateration is not done using signal strength, which tends to give...

I'm blogging now from the 2014 Mobile World Congress, MWC 2014, in Barcelona, so I'm writing quickly. If you or a colleague are at MWC, and are interested in indoor location technologies, there are two demos that you definitely want to see. (In fact, there are more than two, and I'll blog about others later. But the others will take more explanation, and I wanted to share these two now quickly.) The first is in the official MWC mobile application. In the mapping section, you can see your own location and track yourself on the map as you move around. You can also navigate to specific booths you're looking for. As I wrote earlier , the location positioning in this app is based on technology from PoleStar , even though this isn't indicated explicitly since they were a subcontractor to a subcontractor. The location positioning uses a combination of Wi-Fi fingerprinting, BLE beacons, and motion sensing.  The positioning isn't perfect, which isn't a surprise ...

Sunday evening, on the eve of the week of this year's Mobile World Congress, a press release was sent out announcing that this year's MWC would have "one of the world's biggest Wi-Fi networks," with over 1200 access points covering over 240,000 square meters. This is enough to make anyone who's attended a previous MWC conference say "whew! about time!" But deep in the press release is another, even more exciting, announcement: "GSMA is introducing new functionality in its GSMA mobile app... geo-localised routes." That's right - this year's MWC will include indoor location services, including mapping and navigation. The press release doesn't elaborate, but the indoor location technology for the MWC Wi-Fi network and mobile app is being provided by PoleStar , a start-up company based on France with offices in the USA. PoleStar is one of over 130 companies profiled and analyzed in our recently-updated report on Indoor Location...

We've just released our latest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technology . Our previous report, released in March, 2013, was 268 pages, and this newly updated report is a whopping 417 pages! What takes almost 150 extra pages? First, there are around 50 additional start-up companies profiled, and several new major technology vendors as well, bringing the coverage to 135 companies total. Many of the major companies have more patent filings, ongoing research, or products in the area than they did previously. Proximity beacons are receiving a lot more attention now than they did 9 months ago, ever since Apple announced iBeacon and a whole lot of companies, major and start-up, jumped into the fray. There are also a lot more high-accuracy positioning companies now, using UWB or other hardware-based techniques. And a lot more companies are offering valuable indoor services to the retail, healthcare, or other industries. Want to know more? Check out the ...

We're now 2 weeks into 2014, and we've had two acquisitions of start-up companies in the Internet of Things area. One of these deals, yesterday's acquisition of Nest by Google  for around $3.2 billion, will get a lot of media attention because the buyer was Google. The other, last week's acquisition of ThingWorx by PTC  for around $130 million, will get a lot less attention. But it's the two together that are huge news for technology trends in 2014. When we published our first report on Internet of Things in July, 2013, people were saying things like "is the Internet of Things really going to happen," "will people really want it?" and "what's the point?" Now, a half a year later, the Internet of Things is clearly on the way, and people are discussing the implications and concerns . Nest and ThinkWorx are two of the more than thirty companies profiled in our report . They each demonstrate a different approach to implementing ...