Indoor Positioning -Cloud Support for Location Apps?

Indoor Positioning Systems (occasionally referred to as IPS) are hotting up...Navteq recently announced the launch of their Destination Maps service enabling "orientation, guidance and routing for interior spaces"

According to Navteq, Destination Maps "moves the industry beyond the interactive floor plan maps available today and into a three-dimensional data model essential to a more advanced exploration and guidance experience.  It does this by providing pedestrian-specific attributes unique to interior requirements like stairs and elevators as well as recognizing different floor levels (called Z-levels) that are essential for applications to "understand" movement between floors once inside a venue and generate routes and guidance.  NAVTEQ Destination Maps also include a Virtual Connections feature that enables more intuitive guidance by recognizing how pedestrians "cut across" open areas."

Hopefully, the NAQVTEQ development will come hand in hand with more widespread deployment of Femto cells within buildings, to get over those annoying network black-spots that still plague mobile subscribers in certain areas.

A number of location start-ups are looking to capitalize on the promise of indoor location, including Dubai-based GloPos and Swedish start-up Qubulus.

Qubulus co-founder Frank Schuil recently contributed to an article for TheNextWeb explaining where indoor positioning can benefit the current application market the most. Here are a couple of ideas from that article suggested by Frank:

1. Airport apps

In this case indoor positioning can benefit all parties. Consumers can meet other travelers in their proximity, get point of sales notifications from the shops in the airport and know how long it would take to walk to the gate based on their current position.

The airport can monitor the mobile traffic for crowd control, staff management and alerts and the airlines can locate passengers giving them a push notification to start walking towards the gate just in time to prevent delays.  There are already some nifty mobile apps out there that could easily extend their service this way like GateGuru and American Airlines’ recently released Android app.

2. Point of sales apps

Location-based coupons in one way or another have always been the holy grail of the LBS industry. To be able to target a consumer with the right message at the point of sale can drastically improve the ROI of any marketing campaign.

The problem to date is that shops are often inside malls and that products are always indoors. Without indoor positioning the point of sale has proven to be too distant for people to act upon the offer. To get people to buy into an offer indoor positioning needs to drop down to <1m accuracy and become a commodity that existing services can seamlessly integrate into their service to trigger the consumer in the physical space. As a reminder to those who see the possibilities of trigger marketing; the key is not to be as intrusive as the  mall screens in the Tom Cruise movie hit Minority Report.

One of the traditional issues with IPS was the need for building owners (such as shopping mall owners) to make an investment in (expensive) transmitting technology. New technologies based on hybrid positioning, smarter algorhythms and cloud-based infrastructure could take IPS beyond it's current niche markets.

uLocate and NAVTEQ's Traffic.com team up on iPhone

BOSTON's uLocate has been steadily building up its WHERE LBS platform to be able to deliver a wide range of applications and services across the major carriers in the US. Its strategy is paying off, as it sets to deploy yet another useful service, this time on the iPhone by teaming up with NAVTEQ owned Traffic.com.

Below is an extract from uLocate's press release of the 14th of September:

Traffic.com is the largest provider of traffic related data in the U.S. with coverage in 124 major metropolitan areas, providing fastest and shortest routes to commuters based on real-time traffic and incident data and traffic patterns. Joining Traffic.com’s comprehensive data with uLocate’s expertise in location-enabled mobile application development and award-winning WHERE® platform provides commuters with a traffic service that will help them reduce time spent driving.

“Traffic.com is the #1 traffic-only website in the U.S., helping commuters save time and frustration in their daily lives” said Jeff Mize, Executive Vice President of Sales from NAVTEQ. “We are delighted that uLocate will leverage the brand by enabling the services on Traffic.com across mobile with their proven WHERE platform.”

The Traffic.com application’s advanced features and functionality includes:
• MyTraffic™ personalized drives that are synced with the Traffic.com website to allow users to create customized routes.
• Unique JamFactor™ calculations to quickly inform drivers of the severity of traffic delays using real-time data as well as historical speed flow.
• Real-time, color-coded traffic flow moving maps that can be panned or zoomed to quickly view area traffic congestion or set to GPS mode to move along with commuters built on the NAVTEQ MapTP platform.
• Comprehensive incident data that includes accidents, construction, events, weather and congestion.
• The ability to save favorite roads and road segments for quick access through the traffic dashboard.
• Top traffic hotspots by city or selected roads.
• Mass transit data from local transportation departments.
• Location-enabled discount offers from relevant and trusted merchants enabled through NAVTEQ’s LocationPoint advertising platform.

Traffic.com’s data comes from GPS probe devices, commercial and government partners, center staff members, and a proprietary network of 1,000 digital traffic sensors, creating the most comprehensive traffic data available. Sensor networks update real time speed and volume information every few minutes and incident information is updated continuously throughout the day by local traffic operations staff.

Expect an Android, Palm and Blackberry version soon.

P-Cell Technology -New locator Alternative for LBS

KOREA: This time, a development to report on from Korea, where in 2007 a patent was published for a new type of locator technology for a 'network-based Location measurement method...using P-Cell database'.

Not being a technical sort of guy, and this being a very new technology, I will leave it up to the engineers out there to correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is as follows:

This technology attempts to overcome the issues surrounding location triangulation using conventional Cell ID...namely, accuracy and reliance on operator network cell size parameters.

Instead, the new technology divides an area into pre-defined 'lattices'of a predetermined size which are mapped in a P-Cell database (where the P stands for Parametrized).

Then it continuously determines whether a request for location measurement occurs by a service subscriber; and when the request for location measurement is generated, it compares fundamental information received from a mobile terminal with the P-Cell database, determines a matching P-Cell, and reports the matching P-Cell to the service subscriber.

The advantages are that indoor location fixes are improved by about 70% (or so the technology patent says).

As far as I can determine, the system works like standard base tower signal triangulation (or trilateration, to be more precise) but instead of using the operator's cell tower signal radii, it uses 'lattices' of a standard dimension.

I have asked Tom Tierney from Navteq to shed more light on this technology and welcome any comments from readers who wish to add more information, particularly whether any testing has been carried out outside of Asia.

Either way, a key point is that location on mobile will increasingly become ubiqitous and most likely by offering subscribers a choice from a range of alternatives to ensure they can access location services wherever they may be.

Nokia Maps 2.0 -Location Detection without GPS

Nokia announced on May 12th at the Where 2.0 Conference in Burlingame, California, that they had released their Nokia Maps 2.0 beta, with a raft of upgraded features and web linkage to its Ovi.com site.

Ovi is a Nokia Web portal for Internet services such as content sharing. Maps on Ovi will let people use and mark up maps on the Web and then upload their changes to a cell phone. This is all part of Nokia new gambit into the world of software development and its desire to extend its reach beyond its own hardware.

However, the interesting part is a not-as-yet-reported initiative by Nokia to make Nokia Maps truly mainstream by eliminating both the need for GPS and the need for the Mobile Network Operator.

How? Simple...by investing over the last few years in building up its own database of cell IDs matched to geo-cordinates, and then building functionality in Nokia Maps that allows for an estimate of the user's location based only on cell ID.

Gone would be the days of waiting up to 5 minutes for GPS fixes, 'indoor blackspots' and battery drainage... Location Based Services would truly be able to achieve the ubiqitous status that both Navteq and Nokia are placing their strategic bets on.

The implications of this development are truly dramatic and it will not be long before the impact is noted by companies operating in this space...

Future of Location Based Services...according to Navteq

BARCELONA -I was at the Forum Nokia Camp in Barcelona today and attended the presentation by Tom Tierney, Developer Alliance Manager at Navteq, based in Chicago.

Here are some tidbits from his presentation:

• Referring to the difference between PNDs (Personal Navigational Devices) and mobiles, Tom described the mobile device as being the 'navigational ringtone' for the user and sees the PNDs and mobiles to be complimentary instead of competing for the same audience

• Some new technologies not everyone has heard of yet were discussed -namely P-Cell Technology (developed in Korea) and TV-GPS Hybrid Positioning...I will investigate and report back if there are interesting developments in these areas

• According to Tom, the use of audio, touch screens and voice interactivity will eliminate the need for banner ads in the future

• Unsurprisingly perhaps, Tom stated that LBS's will be ubiqitous in the future. Also, according to Navteq's own research, consumers principally want 3 things from them -for them to be cheap, accurate and easy-to-use

• According to Navteq, consumers will pay for navigation and gaming applications but not for social networks and search (in line with internet trends)

• To put figures to the growth opportunity we are talking about here, in Q1 2008, 43% of all downloads on mobile phones globally were for Location Based Services..accounting for 62% of total revenues...a sizeable pie which is clearly growing as we see LBS being demanded for Resource Management or Asset Tracking, Entertainment (including Location based dating) and Security (Child Finder features etc.)