With the continued growth of smartphones, location based services have become pretty useful. From finding a restaurant or ATM in your present location to turn-by-turn directions based on your actual location, these capabilities have now been baked into our everyday lives. On your iPhone or iPad, you have the option to turn these location based services on or off, and just about every app is trying to learn where you are to improve relevance, whether for news, directions, are your friends nearby etc..
With most of the great outdoors pretty well mapped, indoors is the final navigation frontier. Nokia has announced “In-Location” an alliance of 22 companies with the goal of driving and unifying industry innovation in mobile indoor positioning. Founding members include: 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.
Accurate indoor positioning opens up plenty of possibilities for new mobile services. Consumers can receive directions to the right products and personalized product promotions in nearby shops; using real-time navigation inside a building; finding the precise location of assets and people; and even increasing security in emergency situations. For facility owners and local service providers this could enable, for example, increased local customer identification; enhanced product placement; and better customer satisfaction by deploying resources when and where needed.
Brick and mortar retailers are working overtime to make sure that their businesses are not disrupted by the rapidly emerging mobile commerce phenomenon underway. How will they continue to get people into their locations in addition to providing them with the best possible on-line shopping experience? What is it going to take to make sure that their very image conscious brands are perceived as technology leaders in a world of Newism?
So how cool will indoor location based services be? How will this impact retailers and consumers? Time will tell.