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.
