by Ben Allen

• Added March 05, 2010

So I’ve long been interested in all the alternative positioning systems people are working on these days… it seems that if it emits a signal, someone has tried to triangulate off of it to determine position. While GPS is by far the most popular system going (second only to the ‘hey yo where are you?”),  it has some huge drawbacks like the inability to get a position fix indoors where people spend an enormous percentage of their lives.

Skyhook Wireless, and its wi fi based system, began to separate itself from the pack a few years ago with its hugely important deal with Apple… and as you may recall the initial iPhones didn’t even come with GPS on board, but relied solely on Skyhook. Folks like SiRF, an early leader in GPS chipsets, seemed to pooh-pooh the idea that anyone would dare forsake the accuracy for a GPS fix for these more pedestrian and coarse systems.  Well it seems that their pooh-poohing may have been misplaced.

I noticed in today’s GPS business news that Skyhook competitor Navizon has just signed a deal to provide similar services to Microsoft.

 Now each of these technologies has their place… would you want to build a turn by turn navigation device from the ground up without GPS? Probably not. Would you want to send your emergency rescue teams into a burning building with the hopes of locating them with a GPS only system? Probably not.

Rosum uses TV broadcast signals, S5 Wireless (recently rename RECON Dynamics) uses its own unique system and there are various others including different technologies to ‘support’ GPS to help it perform better like enhanced (eGPS) and assisted (A-GPS). Depending on what your needs are it’s definitely worth investigating the options, chances are there is someone out there working on your specific need.

One of the more recent ones that I learned about came from an entrepreneur working on an indoor navigation system using Bluetooth. The nice thing about the solution is that Bluetooth has been around for a while and there are a lot of phones out there with the capability, so not only could a lot of folks navigate indoors by using the Bluetooth in their existing cell phones, but all those old phones could be used as the fixed beacons to build the local system itself, potentially making it quite economical to deploy.  Highly accurate indoor remote POSITIONING systems are one thing, but the idea of a highly accurate indoor NAVIGATION system still seems relatively new and novel.

Now many will argue that indoor navigation may be a bit of a niche market, after all how many indoor spaces are large enough to really require navigation assistance.  But I think where it could get interesting is in large environments which are a mix of indoors and outdoors like parks, cruise lines and many malls and even in heavy urban environments like Manhattan where GPS often fails.  Also if the location accuracy is good enough and it could be paired with mobile search, even a modestly sized store packed with 100k SKUs could someday use the technology as a part of a larger in store customer service portal to help better connect customers with what they’re looking for next time they visit a retail store.