Trends Report

Next In Tech: Indoor Positioning

Indoor Venues Are The Next Frontier For Location-Based Services

January 23rd, 2013
Tony Costa, null
Tony Costa
With contributors:
Thomas Husson , Julie Ask , Peter Sheldon , Carlton Doty , Colin Campbell , Andia Vokshi , Sarah Rotman Epps

Summary

Location is a cornerstone of mobile experiences and enables some of the most widely used mobile apps, such as Foursquare and Yelp. Location has also become a new battleground as Apple, Google, and Microsoft/Nokia battle against one another. Despite location's importance, however, today's satellite-based location technologies are ineffective indoors, where Americans spend up to 90% of their lives. Indoor positioning is remedying this situation by making it possible to fix a person's or an object's location indoors. This will have enormous impact on product strategists in retail, hospitality, transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, and other industries that have a strong emphasis on physical infrastructure. In this report, we examine the new experiences indoor positioning affords; how smartphone-based indoor positioning overcomes the challenges of past indoor positioning technologies; what the major indoor positioning players will be doing in 2013; and how product strategists are using indoor positioning to improve engagement.

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