IDG Contributor Network: Important technology choices for indoor location
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is almost certainly the future technology for indoor navigation. This is not due to any technological superiority: rather, it stems from the design choices of one device maker. But BLE implementations are already diverging into two competing camps, splitting the market and forcing difficult choices on app and infrastructure developers.
We need an indoor location technology for mobile devices in order to enable mapping and navigation apps, and also many other apps requiring location context. Early smartphones used Wi-Fi for indoor location, identifying nearby access points by their periodic beacons and estimating distance from signal strength measurements. This allowed startup companies to build some good turn-by-turn navigation apps for Android and iOS.
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