Grizzly Analytics Blog

Indoor location positioning is currently one of the holy grails of the mobile technology world. With hundreds of millions of people using mobile-based GPS applications every day, the demand is clearly huge for location-aware mobile apps. There are over 150 companies developing indoor location technology , and a number of well-known technology approaches, but bottom line, it's still reaching market. One of the key challenges in developing and deploying indoor location technology is clearly how accurate it is. Many indoor location systems, including those based on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signals, are accurate only to within 5-8 meters. In many applications this is fine. If I want my phone to know what store or coffee shop I'm in, 5-8m accuracy is sufficient to distinguish Starbucks from JC Penny. But if I want my phone to know if I'm standing in front of the pretzels or the potato chips in the supermarket, I need better. As a side point, GPS outdoors is only accurate to within...

Grizzly Analytics founder Bruce Krulwich will be speaking and moderating a technology panel at the PLACE Conference in New York City, on June 9. Contact us at info@grizzlyanalytics.com for a discount code for $200 off the registration price, or to schedule a face-to-face meeting before or after the conference. PLACE is the premier conference for indoor location technologies, particularly their use in retail. See you there!

Every year I love going to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Besides the hands-on time with new phone models and new technologies, I like to meet with people from all over the world, both in start-up companies and at major companies, that are developing innovative new technologies. A year ago I reported seeing indoor location positioning technology from a company in Japan called MTI, based on an innovative approach using ultrasonic sound. In a nutshell, MTI deploys small speaker units that transmit ultrasonic sound signatures, that people can't hear but that can be received on a smartphone's microphone. Each speaker unit, acting as a beacon, transmits a unique signal. The MTI application on a smartphone will receive a collection of those signals, from all the speaker units within range, along with volume levels for each signal that indicates how far away the speaker unit is from the phone. Given a database of locations of the speaker units, MTI's system uses mult...

I first met Fabio and Kimmo from Quuppa in 2012 , before Quuppa existed, when they had spent years researching indoor location positioning technologies at Nokia Research Center. Less than a year after that they formed Quuppa , independent of Nokia, to bring their technology to market. At the time I called Quuppa " the newest and oldest in indoor location positioning ." Fast forward two and a half years. Their technology has reached market, it can now track both smartphones and BLE devices, and it's accurate to within 20-50cm. Before reading more about their technology, take a look at a video of their demo  in action: Grizzly Analytics has analyzed indoor location technologies by over 150 companies , and virtually all of the radio-based technologies operate by measuring the distance  between the device being tracked and other radio devices, and using these distance measurements for either multilateration or fingerprinting. For example, the well known BLE beacons me...

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-...

Wow. What does it mean when a giant company like HP acquires networking giant Aruba, and the 3rd paragraph of the Forbes article on the subject discusses indoor location technology: With Aruba Networks contributing  roughly $800 million to $1 billion in wireless revenue, the acquisition would only a small increase to the new HP Enterprise company ’s  revenue base. However, it would bolster HP ’ s overall networking market share   and provide a newer platform to support the  best  wave of mobility services. Aruba made several important acquisitions over the past two years that has positioned the company to support the future of WLAN growth. It acquired Meridian in 2013.  Meridian uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate    but also offers tools to build apps for businesses that want location-awareness as part of their mobile offering... This market is different from s...

NEWLY UPDATED REPORT: Indoor Location Positioning Technology: Research, Solutions and Trends The indoor location area continues to explode. Mobile applications are reaching market that deliver the accuracy and reliability that users want. Chips are being made for next-generation smartphones and mobile devices that promise to bring universal indoor location positioning to the mass market. Proximity systems are changing how retail establishments understand and interact with their customers. New chips are poised to bring indoor location positioning to new Internet of Things and Smart Home devices and appliances. And new technologies are changing the capabilities, accuracy, and reliability of indoor location systems. This newly updated report is the fifth in a series of reports on indoor location technologies. In past years, the biggest changes have been technological, in terms of approaches taken and how they were implemented. In this year's report, the biggest changes h...