Indoor Location Based Services

Everyone is familiar with the usability of GPS aka navigation system to find your way around in a city, I am sure many of us have also wished if we had a navigation system to help us locate a store or restaurant inside a mall or navigate inside a college campus or airport.   Apple, Google, Nokia, Cisco & many other companies have been investing in hardware & software using various technologies such as GPS/Cellular/Wifi Triangulation & Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy aka BLE to provide a solution for indoor location-based services with accuracy. Indoor Location-Based Service is a boon for marketers to connect with customers & has potential to change the retail/hospitality experience, mobile payments & much more. Indoor Location Based Service market is poised to reach $5B by 2018(source ABI research). Lots of retailers are rolling our indoor location service support to enhance the shopping experience where shoppers can locate objects with ease, and also call for service when needed.  Businesses can up-sell and cross-sell in real time based on a customer’s search preferences. For example, a person purchasing a printer can be guided to ink cartridges available at a discounted rate.  In hospitality, a person passing by a bar or waiting in the lobby can be provided with happy hours information or coupons for an appetizer.

Physical tracking of customers inside a store or hotel yields useful information, the data can be used to plan & deploy an appropriate number of staff members in that area of the hotel or to open more checkout lines in a store.

Indoor location based service can be also very useful in below areas: