An ace up Google's sleeve in Bluetooth-based Indoor Positioning?

Everyone's talking these days about Google's new indoor mapping, which they say will track a cellphone's location as a person walks around a mall or airport. This would obviously be a huge breakthrough, now that everyone's gotten used to using cellphones for navigation and location services, and would naturally like to keep doing so while walking around a mall.

Nokia just counter-attacked with an update on their own indoor navigation research, which uses Bluetooth-based "beacons" to improve indoor positioning. Of course, this research isn't new, it's a continuation of work at Nokia that dates back several years. But the new announcement places this new capability in the context of new Windows-based smartphones.

Of course, there are dozens of companies working on indoor positioning. Grizzly Analytics reported many of these in our report on next-generation location services, and we'll soon have an updated report out on indoor location positioning which analyzes research by Google, Nokia, RIM, Qualcomm, Samsung and many more.

In the meantime, here's a fun fact that nobody has reported in the recent flurry of articles on the race between Nokia and Google to indoor location services: Who do you think holds a granted U.S. patent on using Bluetooth for indoor positioning?

Google.

A U.S. patent titled Location determination for mobile units was granted back in 2004 to Motorola. It discussed, in terminology that feels outdated this many years later, using fixed Bluetooth devices with known locations to track mobile devices that are also Bluetooth-equipped.

Yep, that's the same as using beacons to position smartphones.

This patent is presumably soon to be owned by Google, with their acquisition of Motorola Mobility and their huge patent portfolio.

Of course, there are many differences between the methods discussed in this patent and Nokia's research. Motorola's method did the computation in the cloud, while Nokia's looking at location determination on the handset. And Nokia's looking at more sophisticated algorithms for triangulation and positioning.

But it's fascinating nonetheless that Nokia's big announcement of Bluetooth-based positioning, that they and everyone thought (with justification) would differentiate them strongly from Google's approach, would step right into the area of a Google-owned patent.

Want to learn more about research underway at a wide variety of companies in the area of indoor positioning? Check back soon for an up-to-date and insightful report on the subject from Grizzly Analytics.

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-

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

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible. I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving. This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest. (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States. (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .) So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions. (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice. (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what

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