Skip to main content

Indoor Location technology deployed at MWC 2014

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 Positioning Technologies. The Fira Barcelona is the largest-ever deployment of PoleStar's NAO Campus platform.

We'll report more details on the exact technology deployed at MWC tomorrow, but in general, PoleStar's technology combines Wi-Fi fingerprinting, sensor fusion motion sensing, and their own "BlueSpot" beacons based on BLE (Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy) radio.  We've written about PoleStar's technology in our blog. We'll report as soon as possible on the exact technology deployed at MWC, and give our impressions of using it.

We hope everyone at MWC enjoys the conference - we always do!

For more on the 2014 Mobile World Congress, indoor location technology, and other innovative mobile technology, follow us on our blog or on Twitter.


Popular posts from this blog

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