Grizzly Analytics Blog

It was great attending and presenting at the PLACE London conference last week on November 17. Many technology vendors in the indoor location space, mostly start-ups but larger companies as well, were in attendance, and many large retail companies were there as well. It was the perfect audience to discuss indoor location technology and its impact on retail. My panel on sensor technologies included representatives from CSR (recently acquired by Qualcomm), Meridian (a subsidiary of Aruba networks) and Pole Star, all companies bringing indoor location technology to market. Other companies presenting at the conference included IndoorAtlas, Qualcomm, Aisle411, LocalSocial, RetailNext, ShopperTrak and Indoorz. Big thanks go to the team from Opus Research for a great job in organizing the conference. Of course, these dozen companies are only a few of the more than 100 companies in the indoor location area. But it was a great cross-sample of the market. Several companies were talking...

The beauty of GPS is that it works everywhere. With a GPS-enabled phone, applications ranging from navigation to picture geotagging, from nearby restaurant search to social network check-ins, can all work everywhere. That is, everywhere outside. Once we go inside, our phones simply remember where we were last observed. There are over 170 companies developing technologies for indoor location positioning, enabling phones to track their locations inside malls, stores, offices, hospitals, airports and more. Not a week goes by without announcements being released of new deployments of indoor location technology. But virtually all the indoor location systems on the market have to be deployed and customized one site at a time. And deploying and customizing these systems takes a lot of time and effort. A new technology brings the promise of changing all that, of enabling indoor location systems to work everywhere, or enabling them to be deployed in new much much more easily. SLAM stands fo...

NEW REPORT: Mobile SLAM Technology: Self-Learning Indoor Location Positioning November 4, 2014 The indoor location positioning technology area is growing tremendously. Not a week goes by that we don’t hear of new products or solutions, new start-up companies or new acquisitions in the area. But the systems reaching market do not deliver indoor location positioning universally, without preparation for each site, and the preparation required for each site often takes a lot of time. Technology in development, about to reach market, can solve both of these challenges. This new technology area is Mobile SLAM, or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, a self-learning indoor location positioning technology. Mobile SLAM offers the promise of systems that can learn to do indoor location positioning anywhere, with no preparation for the site. It also offers to reduce considerably the preparation required for per-site indoor location systems. This report analyzes and explains Mobil...

Grizzly Analytics Chief Analyst Bruce Krulwich will be presenting and moderating a session at the 2014 PLACE London conference. The session is tentatively titled Sensor Technologies for 2015 and Beyond. The conference will be on November 17, 2014, in London. Planning on attending? E-mail me at info at grizzlyanalytics dot com to schedule a time to say hi and talk. See you there!

A common question people ask about indoor location positioning goes something like this: "Why do you need Wi-Fi, or BLE, or other technologies? Why can't it be done based on cellular signals?" The common wisdom, of course, is that cellular signals have so broad a range, so big a coverage area, that they don't differentiate different locations sufficiently. Many mobile companies have implemented indoor positioning based on cellular signals, using multilateration algorithms on cellular signal strengths and antenna locations, and have ended up with 60 to 100 meter inaccuracies on average, often worse. Glopos, based in Helsinki, didn't take "no" for an answer. Instead of relying on cellular signal strength values, Glopos's technology uses a wider variety of cellular signal parameters, models of cell area and shape, and data from other nearby cells, to build self-learning probabilistic models for estimating positions. Their latest tests have achieve...

New Report: Sub-Meter Indoor Location Positioning August 18, 2014 The indoor location positioning technology area is growing tremendously. Not a week goes by that we don’t hear of new products or solutions, new start-up companies or new acquisitions in the area. But many of the systems reaching market don’t deliver the accuracy that users want. Most recently, systems have reached the market that truly offer the levels of accuracy that users want. This new and focused report analyzes and explains the technologies and solutions that deliver location accuracy better than one meter. Details of this report, and a link to purchase it, are available here: http://www.grizzlyanalytics.com/report_2014_08_submeter.html Since 2011, Grizzly Analytics has analyzed and reported on Indoor Location Positioning technologies, both in research labs and in products and solutions. Our most recent comprehensive report was 417 pages, covering over 130 companies, and our next update will ...

Indoor location technologies are definitely a hot topic these days! Here are a few recent articles on the subject: Apple iBeacon challengers multiply: A look at five rivals http://www.zdnet.com/apple-ibeacon-challengers-multiply-a-look-at-five-rivals-7000030830/ Location-based mobile applications poised to take off http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/feature/Location-based-mobile-applications-poised-to-take-off For all the details of indoor location technologies, profiling over 130 companies in the area, see the Grizzly Analytics 417-page report on indoor location positioning technologies .