New Indoor Mobile Positioning Service Comes to Android

By Scot Parkhouse at Native Mobile

November 10 2014

The indoor location market is rapidly making its move to the mainstream.

Every day, new companies and solutions providers are entering the market with indoor positioning platforms to push (to say nothing of the dozen indoor location-related press releases that pass over my desk daily).

As ABI Senior analyst Patrick Connolly recently observed, many companies have focused on one technology or vertical, “but it’s clear that both the opportunity and competition is much greater.”

One highly competitive new offering eager to seize the indoor location opportunities that abound comes to us via sensewhere.

Last week, NativeMobile was briefed on what the sensewhere team has been up to in recent months.

A leading UK provider of indoor positioning solutions, sensewhere is making its new software development kit available “license free” to mobile device manufacturers and platform providers.

The company, headquartered in Edinburgh, has also said that its partners will have the chance to earn revenue from its crowd-sourced regional location databases.

sensewhere is a crowdsourced indoor location system for Android phones. It lets users’ devices map the inside of buildings automatically — building up a database of radio frequency access point data — self-generating and self-correcting as it goes along to deliver impressive location accuracy.

The SDK is available on a ‘nil cost’ basis and can be integrated on a mobile device at either the Application layer, the OS layer, or embedded in the kernel.

“There is no requirement to install expensive onsite hardware, such as beacons, or time-consuming surveys, and extensive trials have reported at least 100 per cent better accuracy and more than 50 percent power saving against the best competitor in the category,” the company said in a press release.

Interestingly, sensewhere’s SDK delivers ultra-low power positioning (Lat/Long/Alt) in both online and offline modes by seamlessly integrating the device on-board location services with sensewhere’s database in any location where the software is used.

“We believe our cutting edge technology coupled with a no-risk commercial model will radically change the world of indoor location,” asserts Rob Palfreyman, sensewhere’s CEO. “While other positioning companies measure themselves by number of venues covered, customers equipping their devices with sensewhere can benefit from global venue coverage in a very short period of time with zero cost to build the database.”