How big is the market for indoor location?
Posted on Tue, Jun 14, 2011
by Carol Politi
ABI Research predicts, in their "Alternative Positioning Technologies" study that the alternative location technologies market will be $2.5 Billion by 2015 - delivering location to applications while people are indoors, underground, or in dense urban areas where GPS does not work effectively.
"The demand for low cost, ubiquitous location data has increased significantly over the last 12 months. Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Facebook and others are battling to enable and control consumer location”, said ABI Research senior analyst Patrick Connolly. “This will bring new opportunities and threats to the market but ultimately will drive a 400% increase in alternative location technology penetration across a range of portable devices, location technologies and location providers."
The indoor location market is divided among a myriad of approaches, including Wi-Fi positioning which already has a large installed base in cell phones. However, Wi-Fi solutions don't deliver precise indoor location and cannot provide 3D - i.e., the location within a building including floor level - without enterprise surveying and involvement. Infrastructure-free location at that level of accuracy requires the use of sensors beyond GPS and Wi-Fi.
According to EETimes "It’s not a case of either/or, but of, a continually evolving hybrid approach. GPS alone will not be sufficient to support the next generation of services and revenue streams. Services such as local search, location-based advertising, geotagging, social networking and augmented reality are all significantly improved through increased accuracy and indoor/ubiquitous location."