Telecom Lead America: Devices major Apple has acquired indoor-GPS company WifiSLAM for $20 million.
The two-year-old startup — based in Silicon Valley — has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals.
Earlier, Berg Insight had estimated that the total global value of the real-time mobile LBA market was €192 million in 2011, representing 5.0 percent of the total mobile ad spend.
Growing at a compound annual growth rate of 90.9 percent, the real-time LBA market is forecasted to be worth € 4.9 billion in 2016, corresponding to 28.3 percent of all mobile advertising and marketing.
Drivers for LBA include growing attach rates of location technologies in handsets, as well as the increasing consumer acceptance of LBS in general.
WifiSLAM offers the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps. The company has a handful of employees, and its co-founders include former Google software engineering intern Joseph Huang.
The move comes as Apple continues to build its arsenal against Google in mapping. It debuted its own mapping service last year to poor reviews and user complaints about inaccurate data. Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized for the quality of the product, and Apple has continued to improve it.
Google already offers indoor mapping in certain locations like airports, shopping centers and sports venues.
According to Global Information, GPS-based LBS (Location-Based Services) face a significant hurdle as 90 percent of people’s time is spent indoors. Indoor positioning offers significant potential for the LBS market.
While GPS remains the technology of choice for many of the outdoor location-based services, a number of technologies are vying to become the solution of choice indoors, from Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, to ‘terrestrial’ GPS, and acoustic or lighting-based solutions.
According to Grizzly Analytics, indoor location will also transform commerce, enabling searching for items on store shelves, sending deals and promotions to nearby customers, advertisements for nearby stores in malls, and more. Location services are also entering the enterprise, with indoor asset tracking, employee search, and more.
Nokia, which is part of the In-Location alliance, earlier said accurate indoor positioning opens up plenty of possibilities for new mobile services.
