Indoor LBS at Powell Books
Posted on Wed, Jun 08, 2011
by Carol Politi
Powell's Books has released an extremely useful indoor location application that demonstrates the potential of indoor navigation for consumers. With this app you can select an individual book title and navigate from where you are to the exact location of the book on the shelf. Who has not been in a bookstore wandering around aimlessly looking for a specific book title? This app also lets you navigate the book store in advance, review staff picks and new releases, and check out upcoming events.
How does it work? Given the unavailability of GPS indoors, with this application you select your current location as the starting point for the routing. However, with installation of infrastructure by the retailer, applications will be able to dynamically detect the user location to set the starting point for a route. Mapping has to be implemented and maintained. Since these applications appear to be successful in driving drive retail sales, we can expect more and more retailers to make this mapping and application development investment.
Why is this bookstore application interesting to TRX? As the value in indoor location becomes more and more obvious - even beyond the critical safety applications to which TRX is delivering solutions today - investment will continue to grow. The delta between commercial and government applications is shrinking. The Army is beginning to deploy mobile application stores and is equipping personnel with Android-based mobile platforms. The obvious hole - both for Government and commercial applications - is where the locations are not controlled and where infrastructure cannot be installed.