We are happy to announce that we are a proud member of the Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA). indoo.rs is actively engaging in the industry and believes that cooperation with each other is the best way to develop and deliver best-of-breed technology. After joining the In-Location Alliance last week, this week we have become part of the LBMA.

The Location Based Marketing Association is an international group dedicated to fostering research, education and collaborative innovation at the intersection of people, places and media. Its goal is to educate, share best practices, establish guidelines for growth and to promote the services of member companies to brands and other content-related providers.

The over 450 members of the LBMA include retailers, agencies, advertisers, media buyers, software and services providers, and wireless companies.

For more information on the LBMA you can visit their page or follow their blog.

Leow Chun Tat from the School of Information Systems at the Singapore Management University said:

“We are a group of students from Singapore Management University. We are developing a mobile application which aims to push targeted E-Coupons to shoppers based on their indoor position within a shopping mall. With indoo.rs, we are able to locate a user’s position within mere seconds. Using indoor.rs was really an eye opener for us. It is revolutionary new and has a powerful positioning, floor detection and point-to-point routing capabilities. The SDK and Indoor Surface viewer allows us to quickly develop and integrate indoo.rs positioning solution into our mobile application with ease. indoor.rs will certainly change the way indoor navigation is done and we look forward to more exciting possibilities in the future.”

Andre Camargo from OneTwo Mobile Apps wrote:

“Working with indoo.rs has been fantastic. With a great product, good precision and an excellent support, its services has helped me a lot. We are developing an app to use inside malls and indoo.rs has provide me all the support necessary. Congratulations for your job!”

We at indoo.rs are really grateful for the trust in our products and we are devoted to continue developing and improving our solutions so that we deliver top performance in a very fast growing industry.

For further feedback from our customers follow our testimonials page.

“We’re excited to be a member of the In-Location Alliance and to contribute towards the best possible indoors localization experience for end users and developers, as well rapid adoption by all players along the value chain.” says Markus Krainz, co-founder and CTO of indoo.rs.  “Standardization is an important driver for the adoption of any new technology. Indoor positioning requirements are currently being considered and defined in multiple organizations. As indoo.rs ramps its research and development capacity, it is
important we align with the key stakeholders and developments in the indoor positioning space.”

About In-Location Alliance

The In-Location Alliance is an industry consortium focused on accurate mobile indoor positioning and promoting deployment of location-based indoor services and solutions. The aim is to ensure a multivendor environment by promoting open interfaces and a standards-based approach. The alliance, which now includes more than 60 members, will create an ecosystem that stimulates innovation, enhances service delivery and accelerates the adoption of solutions and technologies that optimize the mobile experience.

The In-Location Alliance was formed by 22 member companies, including Broadcom, CSR, Dialog Semiconductor, Eptisa, Geomobile, Genasys, Indra, Insiteo, Nokia, Nomadic Solutions, Nordic Semiconductor, Nordic Technology Group, NowOn, Primax Electronics, Qualcomm, RapidBlue Solutions, Samsung Electronics, Seolane Innovation, Sony Mobile Communications, TamperSeal AB, Team Action Zone and Visioglobe. The In-Location Alliance is open for any industry member, who is ready to further investigate business opportunities in indoor location based services and see value and benefits in industry collaboration. For more information visit the In-Location Alliance website.

The news about indoo.rs becoming part of the In-Location Alliance was also featured in GeoConnexion International, one of the industry’s best-known and respected publication platforms.

Social media has proven its usefulness for creating awareness around social and political campaigns. The question now is how useful it is in the business context. We can all agree that social media has a huge reach but does it actually bring revenues? Do you, like Coca Cola, not see “any statistically significant relationship between our buzz and our short-term sales”.

We are looking forward to hearing your opinion!

Next week we are going shopping … I mean we will be at  the Shopping Mall Symposium in Vienna. We will keep you updated on what’s new there soon. Watch out for the shopping centre apps as they will soon be navigating you around your favourite shops… and that thanks to indoo.rs

Apple’s acquisition of indoo.rs competitor WifiSlam further shows the potential of indoor navigation and hints to the next generation of smarter smartphones.

Indoor Navigation is appealing to both consumers and businesses because of the numerous benefits it provides such as navigation, location sharing, shopping list routing, offers/coupons, advertising by location, asset tracking and workforce location, to name a few.

No wonder it’s seen as the new “it” of mobile technology.

Indoo.rs provides indoor localisation for a broad array of applications

This year’s e-Day was all about collaboration, team work and networking and Indoo.rs and Blockhouse’s successful partnership, which was behind the development of the e-Day app, symbolically stood out in the context of the event theme: Getting IT together.

Check out the event here!

Now to the numbers:

Users have used the app in 1823 sessions. Most of the users downloaded the app on the day of the event (57%), and 22% have downloaded it one day in advance. Given the nature of the app – specialized for the event only, this is not surprising.

Around 70% of the users used the app in German and 30% in English. Almost all of the sessions were performed in the territory of the event – Austria, however there are 26 sessions registered from abroad, mainly India and the US.

The average session duration on the event day was 51 seconds.  In terms of activity the highest average time on screen was recorded to be on the web screen, followed by the schedule screen.

The map screen seems to have had most screen views. This is explained with that visitors were attracted to the app for its map displaying and locating feature.

At least – there were 2 crashes recorded at the day of the event. Thankfully non of them lead to a missing person

The app provides maps and information for all 90 speakers and 40 exhibitors in addition to a Live-Stream from Julius Raab Hall.

And it comes with a special feature – cutting-edge indoor navigation for your Android smartphone. The navigation feature can show you the shortest route to an exhibitor or presentation. iPad and iPhone navigation will be supported from Q3 2013.

The app was created through the partnership of Blockhaus Vienna (www.blockhaus-medien.at) and indoo.rs (www.indoo.rs). Blockhaus Vienna develops mobile apps for clients such as Men’s Health Germany and AMA Marketing GmbH. indoo.rs is a technology company specializing in indoor localization and navigation solutions, and works with customers and partners such as Frequentis and ARM, supplier of semiconductor IP.

E-Day: 13 visitors can check out the technology for themselves on stand 37.

Link to app: www.edayapp.at

Measurement Tool

An accurate indoors positioning and navigation tools require a mapping of the ambient Wi-Fi fingerprints to the indoor map (and aligning this map with the outdoor maps). The MMT (Measuring and Mapping Tool) does just that. The tools allows you to

1.) Load and existing or create a new building
2.) Import an indoor map
3.) Reference and align on with respect to an outdoor map
4.) Create/add multiple floors
5.) Set the scale of the indoor (floor) maps
6.) Create/delete/name walls, zones, Points of Interest (POI) and “portals” (escalators, elevators) and look at their properties
7.) Set Wi-Fi fingerprinting parameters
8.) Measure!

When finished, the building and fingerprint database can be saved locally or in the indoo.rs Cloud, for use later on.

Take look at this short video to see what working with the MMT (lite in this case) looks like.

What’s really cool in the new MMT is the ability to visualize the Wi-Fi fingerprint Heatmap. It helps you determine the quality of the Wi-Fi signals/fingerprints and expected positioning accuracy that can be expected in those areas. Using the Heatmap one might decide to add a Wi-Fi access point in a certain area to improve the location accuracy in a part of the building.

Also new in the latest release of the MMT is the ability to defined “no-go” zones that are either physically inaccessible (e.g. outside a building) or off-limits for the intended application audience (e.g. security or maintenance zones).

Surface Client

The indoo.rs Surface client really is there for demo purposes and its features are around basic mapping, positioning and navigation. The Surface Client is there to help application developers get started integrating indoor navigation capabilities into their own applications. These applications might also contain specific information on the building mapped (specific shops, promotions, public transport departures, ability to post location on social networks, etc, etc).

The indoo.r SDK

The SDK is the heart of the indoo.rs client side tools, and what an application develop or systems integrator would use to build exciting apps. The SDK allows you to do all the things that are possible in the Surface Client as well as bundle the maps and Wi-Fi fingerprint database into your custom applications. The SDK contains the capabilities to use the devices accelerometer, gyroscope and compass for inertial navigation (dead-reckoning). Sensor fusion magic, unique sparse matrix optimizations, unparalleled Kalman filter implementations, as well as other entropy-busting, and non-Gaussianity mitigating special sauce is included as well. All of this will simply improve the speed and accuracy of your applications’ positioning without the headaches.

Indoo.rs applications are developed using Eclipse and the Android SDK for the Android target platform. More to come in terms of supported platforms in a later post!

Summary

So there you go. Indoo.rs tools available to you, sketched in lay man’s terms and a nutshell. Interested? Send an email to request access or visit the indoo.rs web site and get started today!

Why did we do this and why is this important?

At indoo.rs we believe that indoor positioning and navigation will become ubiquitous: available on every device, for every application, and, of course, in every location. Having a great user experience – fast, accurate, battery power efficient is crucial to make this a reality. Large amounts of sensor data fusion, filtering and post-processing is required for an accurate localization. Hence, optimizing for and embedding indoo.rs’ navigation technology in mobile device hardware platforms is essential . ARM is a leading platform for mobile devices, and the ARM Connected Community provides the resources and support to achieve this.

While not a completely new technology, indoor positioning and navigation is becoming more broadly available to more users, applications and devices – as was recently outlined in a Forrester Research report “Next in Tech – Indoor Positioning”. This is a big leap forward from previous “vertical” indoor navigation applications that are custom built for specific B2B use cases and application areas, represent closed environments, and have associated high costs. These solutions were typically built using bespoke technology solutions and rely on “beacons” to achieve a sufficiently accurate positioning.

Today we’re on the cusp of universal accurate indoor positioning and navigation, using the sensors available on the majority of mobile devices (accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, pressure) and the existing ambient electromagnetic environment (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, geo-magnetic fields); and using indoor maps – now being collected at an accelerated pace by the likes of Google, Nokia, Microsoft, Micello, the OpenStreetMap initiative, and others. The availability of application software, such as developed by indoo.rs, connects the two and we can expect this application software to sink down the stack onto mobile device’s hardware, embedded by chipset manufacturers, thus delivering indoor positioning and navigation capabilities to any user on any device.

What, then, are the use cases that drive adoption, as the technology and ecosystem continue to advance. The initial use cases will be B2B – businesses investing in indoor navigation applications to optimize their (internal) business processes and/or deliver better services to end-customers and partners. The application areas are numerous:

Public Safety and Healthcare

Public safety systems are available that show the location of officers on control-room screens using GPS signals sent by their mobile devices. If a suspect carries a mobile phone that a law enforcement agency has a fix on, or they are being closely followed by a covert officer, they too may be tracked. Using indoor positioning capabilities, the useful range of such systems can be extended to indoor locations where GPS coverage is absent, such as malls, underground transport, and airports.

Using Wi-Fi network monitoring solutions, for example, public venues can determine the location of user who’s mobile phone are Wi-Fi enabled. This also allows accurately estimating movement patterns of individuals and crowds. Users of an indoor navigation application can be notified of any emergency situations. Moreover, effective crowd control strategies can be supported by directing those users to emergency exits, using the best accessible routes.

In a hospital environment indoor navigation can be used for such emergency situations too of course. But there’s real value in helping navigate visitors as well as patients to their intended destination through these increasingly large institutions. This would increase the overall care level and service quality in general, and would help drive efficiency metrics such as the percentage if missed/late appointments in particular.

Manufacturing

In large plants (for example refineries or production facilities) making sure that resources and personnel are at the right place at the right time is a crucial factor driving production costs. Having an accurate way to locate resources and navigate those to the appropriate location at the correct time can be a significant productivity driver, for example to reduce downtime. This becomes especially clear when there is a significant amount of outsourced services and personnel that is being relied upon for maintenance and break-fix operations.

A similar use case exists for warehousing, where indoor trucks and loads can be localized centrally. In the ideal case, where the indoors location of resources is integrated into a routing application, those can then be automatically routed to the appropriate locations, quickly and easily.

The beauty of the new generation of indoor navigation technology such as provided by indoo.rs is that this can now be typically achieved without any investments in additional infrastructure – a reasonable Wi-Fi network coverage suffices!

In a follow-on blog post, we will examine use cases with direct consumer interaction: travel, hospitality, retail.

If you are interested in exploring what indoor navigation can mean for you please contact me on marcel@indoo.rs.