July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Have you ever tried to find your way through the inside of a sprawling Las Vegas Strip hotel? The odds are good you got lost and stopped at a table to gamble. The casinos may like it that way, but Lighthouse Signal Systems figures that consumers don’t.

The company is launching its indoor positioning system as an open service for Android app developers. Once developers make use of this technology, you will be able to use their apps to find your way through the vast indoor terrain of Las Vegas’ hotels and casinos. Once developers adopt it, they can launch location apps in the Google Play store.

Indoor navigation is one of the last major tasks that smartphones have to conquer. Outdoor navigation works great thanks to satellite fixes via the global positioning system (GPS). But GPS doesn’t work indoors, and it’s hard to find consistent WiFi signals and other ways to navigate inside buildings.

But Cambridge, Mass.-based Lighthouse Signal Systems is now launching its service covering 20 million square feet of entertainment and retail space at leading casinos and hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. Among the early adopters is Caesars Entertainment, one of the major casino chains.

Lighthouse is making its service freely available to Android app developers, resort operators, retailers, and others seeking to enhance the visitor experience in Las Vegas. Indoor navigation is a Holy Grail for the mobile industry, and Lighthouse says it is the first to provide GPS-like indoor positioning on a wide scale in a major U.S. metro.

“We are excited to support app developer partners as they create new mobile experiences with indoor positioning in Las Vegas, where large resort interiors have traditionally presented a vexing challenge for visitors,” said Lighthouse co-founder Parviz Parvizi.

The theory goes that casinos want you to get lost so you spend more money. But Parvizi says that multi-resort holding companies expect to prosper from cross-property circulation, and navigation can help that happen. Even within individual properties, consumers want a better experience finding things.

“Providing location-based services does not really reduce how much time people spend at the resorts but instead has the potential to enhance the overall experience,” he said. “From a resort owner perspective, the time that a visitor spends wandering around being lost is a wasted opportunity that could be better and more profitably spent on gaming or entertainment.”

Lighthouse’s platform includes indoor geofencing: a hosting platform for location-based offers and user analytics. Caesars has conducted early trials with the service. Lighthouse plans to expand to malls and retailers at major top 20 metropolitan areas. With any apps using the service, users must provide an opt-in acknowledgement. And developers are not able to use the service to track mobile phone users without user consent.

Others trying to do this include Google, Cisco, Ekahau, Euclid, Shopkick, PoinInside, Aisle411, Sensionlab, Indoor.rs, Yfind, and CSR. The company has five employees, including co-founder Mohammad Heidari, who studied the issue at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The tech has been in the works for several years. The first patent was granted this year.

The technology is in the market today. Lighthouse uses a combination of WiFi fingerprinting and sensor data. As long as there are WiFi networks in the area, Lighthouse can provide positioning info.

The service is free for developers who are experimenting. As volume picks up, Lighthouse will charge fees.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Indoor location data may just save your life.

Guardly, which creates mobile public safety infrastructure, has launched its Indoor Positioning System, which shows why the great indoors is the next frontier for emergency response.

“We joke about it, but accurate location is like the Holy Grail of emergency response,” Guardly CEO Josh Sookman told me.

Unlike with landline phones, which are attached to physical locations, emergency calls made via cell phones are a lot harder to track down, especially when people make them from large locations or are moving around.

Guardly, however, fixes that problem by using a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth data, which its software uses to triangulate a caller’s exact location in real time. That’s a big deal in, say, a huge office building, where it could take time for response teams to find where a mobile call is coming from. (It also works well in places like parking garages and elevators, which often have dead zones.)

Beyond large buildings, Sookman says that Guardly has some pretty obvious applications for places like college campuses, stadiums, and even transit systems. Beyond that, however, Guardly is still taking its time. “We’re starting to have conversations with municipalities, but we’re not there yet ” he said.

Our team will be off to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas soon, and we’ll get plenty of glimpses of the future of technology there. We’ve all heard a lot of promises. But here are some things we’d love to see and use in real life in the near future — whether or not they’re at CES.

We’re not sure if we can get our wish, but this is the list of the coolest technologies that we can’t wait to use. I’ve relied on staff recommendations and other big thinkers for these tips. Thanks, all.

Tell us which one is your favorite in the poll, or suggest your own in the comments.

Google Glass

This technology is one of the truly inspired products coming down the road. It combines an eyeglass-style display with computing power and wireless technology that can deliver information to you based on what you look at in your surrounding environment. Project Glass promises to deliver information to you the instant you need it, like identifying the face of someone standing in front of you. Or so we hope.

Self-driving cars

Another innovation from Google is going through rigorous testing and the regulatory mill. These cars drive themselves based on computing, wireless, and camera technologies that can make a robot-driven car safer than a human-driven one. You can sit in the driver’s seat and do your email, but you can also override the controls if necessary. Once it’s polished, we’d love to take the car for a spin. But not before they get the bugs out.

Apple television

Okay, this mythical beast doesn’t really have to be made by Apple. But we need a TV that truly combines the best of the Internet and the best of traditional cable television. Apple has hinted something is coming that will transform the living room. We want to be able to play free or 99-cent apps on the high-definition screen and access our favorite TV shows and first-run movies. We have no clue, though, when this rumored Apple device will really arrive (if ever).

A 72-core Tegra 4-based tablet computer

Nvidia hasn’t announced anything yet, but the rumor is it will describe its next-generation Tegra chip at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. If that happens, you can expect that dozens of tablets and smartphones will follow. Tablets thrive on efficient battery use as well as performance. But Nvidia has been moving down the path of creating Tegra technology that offers both low-power consumption and outstanding 3D graphics and processing power at the same time. It’s time for another great leap that could put tablets on par with — or ahead of — the traditional PC.

Cool wireless technologies that don’t make us glow

The bottleneck in delivering fast Internet service to homes and mobile devices has strangled a lot of innovations. Bridging the last mile and delivering blazing-fast speeds to both home and mobile users is one of the great challenges facing us. It could be done with a huge investment in infrastructure, but smart technology might make it a reality as well. Steve Perlman (of Rearden and formerly the head of OnLive) has demoed Project DIDO, a distributed wireless Internet technology that gets around bottlenecks and delivers awesomeness in the not-so-distant future. We hope it’s real. And it would be great and necessary bonus if these technologies were really safe as well.

Cheap rides into space

I’m still waiting for the Southwest Airlines of space travel to arrive. Maybe $99 to the moon and back? After all, we want to be space tourists one day. The space shuttle has died, but maybe private companies will make it happen.

Better robots

It would be nice if we could count on the help of household robots and maybe get all of these great gadgets made by robots working in factories in the U.S. I’d like to try out a few personal robots, once they slim down in size and become a little more humanoid.

Indoor location

CSR’s Sirf Technologies division has figured out how to map indoor locations when you’re walking with your mobile phone inside a building. Now we have to see it in practice. Companies like WifiSLAM are hoping to make this real. We can’t wait until we can find our way through the giant hotel-casinos of Las Vegas without getting lost.

4K televisions that cost $500

I know that 4K TV, or those with four times as many pixels as today’s high-definition TVs, are going to be plentiful at CES. In the past year, these so-called Ultra HD TVs have debuted at prices at $25,000 or so. Can we skip the whole learning curve part and jump to the $500 model soon?

A.I./brains

I need a better brain. Or a brain enhancement. I’m counting on Jeff Hawkins’ Grok technology, which promises to deliver “big data” analysis based on the processing that resembles what happens in the human brain. Or something like it. It’s like those chips in William Gibson’s novel Johnny Mnemonic.

Personal gaming

Will Wright shared a vision last year for personal gaming, or a mobile game that was smart enough to know your interests, know your location, understand your context, and then deliver a surprising, fun gaming experience to you. The game collects a lot of big data about you and processes that. Then it creates a custom experience, a game made for just one person. You.

An awesome game console

How about a great video game console? One with free-to-play games with both traditional game controls and gesture recognition. I’d love to have a wide variety of indie games as well as blockbusters, and I’d like to extend my play to mobile game platforms and the web. Add backward-compatibility and cloud computing. Let’s hope that Sony and Microsoft are listening. Nintendo’s Wii U doesn’t quite do it for me.

Quantified self gadgets that automate calorie counting

We’ve got devices like Striiv that can count our steps. Other gadgets (like the Basis Health Tracker) can monitor our sleep, record our heart rate, and sync with the cloud. But we’d really like to get a device that photographs our meals (or does something like that) and calculates how many calories we’ll consume. This kind of technology could complete the loop in terms of figuring out our physical activity and our food intake, giving us the data we could use to calculate whether we are exercising enough and eating right. (VentureBeat’s John Koetsier supplied this idea, based on the “<a href=”“quantified self” movement where people try to measure everything about themselves).

If this list of new technologies doesn’t sound ambitious enough, we’re also waiting for some pie-in-the-sky science fiction to become reality. We’d like to go for a ride in the Star Trek Holodeck, a virtual reality simulation that is indistinguishable from reality, or live in the Metaverse virtual world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. And I’d like to use that gesture-based computer that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. But we’re assuming it’s going to take a while before the tech and entertainment industries can deliver on those visions.

Now if Moore’s Law ever stopped in its tracks, the engine behind all of this change would grind to a halt. Then we could say that things might truly get boring. On the other hand, nanotechnology might be quite useful in replacing semiconductor manufacturing with something else. So we’re not counting on getting bored anytime soon.

Image credits: Google, cmmorrison/Flickr, guilhermescha/Flickr, Nvidia, Lionsgate Television, SpaceX, Nao, Microsoft/Bing, LG, VLADGRIN/Shutterstock, Samsung, Samir Torres/VentureBeat

In the race to bring indoor location technology to market, an eight-person startup is taking on big-name players Google, Qualcomm and Samsung. And they have the potential to win.

For the underdogs at Silicon Valley-based WifiSLAM, indoor location services are on the cusp of a second wave. Simply put, services like these aim to do inside what GPS-based navigation does outside. Imagine that you’re in a shopping mall or museum, your smartphone will soon be able to detect your location, within a few meters of accuracy.

If successful, this technology has the potential to impact every industry. “We believe all physical spaces can be as interactive as digital spaces,” said Joseph Huang, WifiSLAM’s cofounder.

Huang isn’t alone in his regard for the space: Indoor location has been getting a lot of renewed interest as of late with companies like Google building dedicated in-house teams. CSR has been demoing the technology for months, and Samsung, Nokia and, Qualcomm recently announced a partnership to invest in and create use cases for indoor location services, which they aim to put in consumer devices by next year.

WifiSLAM is an alumni of Stanford’s tech accelerator “StartX” and has raised a million dollars from a mix of venture capital firms and angel investors, including Google’s Don Dodge and Relay Ventures’ cofounder Kevin Talbot, a mobile computing expert, since incorporating in spring 2011.

WifiSLAM breaks the GPS barrier a little differently than its heavyweight competition, and fellow startups like Finland-based IndoorAtlas (it’s worth checking out — it taps into the magnetic fields that are naturally present in the Earth.) WifiSLAM’s solution uses a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and allows for a much finer degree of precision than what’s currently available through “indoor navigation” tools.

WifiSLAM collects location fingerprints based on the relative strength of Wi-Fi signals as you move through a building and then uses this data to determine your exact position on a map — your “signal signature,” the founders call it.

The value proposition is that they are marketing directly to application developers, rather than end-users like retailers and merchants. With this strategy, the team has impressed Dodge (pictured left), an angel investor and chief developer relations advocate at Google. Dodge referred the founders to AngelList, and is an outspoken supporter for WifiSLAM. ”Building a technology platform requires application developers to succeed,” Dodge told me.

According to Google’s Don Dodge, indoor location is the most exciting opportunity for investors

Dodge, who joined Google in 2009 from Microsoft, mentioned that he is more excited about indoor location technologies than any other space. My inclination is that this will pave the way for some exciting new functionalities in Google Maps. Presumably, the search giant hopes that advertisers will jump at the chance to serve discounts and deals at the exact moment when consumers are contemplating making a purchase. It’s a development that will change the face of advertising.

For Dodge and other high-profile advocates of the space, the potential for the technology is endless. “Imagine being in a supermarket and having your phone guide you exactly to each item on your grocery list,” he said. Using indoor Wi-Fi, “coupons and offers [will be] delivered to your phone based on where you are in the store,” and you’ll know, “exactly where your friends and family members are.” Parents, you’ll be able to locate your kids, assuming you’ve given them smartphones, if they’re ever lost in a shopping mall!

WifiSLAM’s cofounders, Jessica Tsoong, David Millman, Darin Tay (formerly an iOs engineer at Google) and Huang, remain optimistic about their chances despite stiff competition. They reported that their developer base has grown by 250 percent in the last three weeks through word of mouth. The API is free for developers to improve their location-based apps, and it only takes 90 seconds to try out the beta.

Joseph Huang, WifiSLAM’s cofounder

Huang (pictured left), a Stanford computer science grad, said that developers will be responsible for pushing the technology to its limits. The early adopters have already experimented with a variety of use-cases, including audio tours in a museum. The app can pinpoint exactly where a museum-goer is standing, and serve relevant information.

The remaining challenge facing indoor Wi-Fi services is to prove to the public that the technology actually works.

Indoor Wi-Fi was supposed to be the groundbreaking innovation of the previous decade. When it emerged in 2008, tech companies made grandiose claims about hyper-targeted, geo-located advertising, and retailers ate it up. But these early attempts failed to meet expectations.

Despite this, Huang said that in the coming months, there will be thousands of new mobile applications that will take advantage of indoor location “in ways we haven’t thought about.” And with the recent success of geo-location based services like Foursquare and Shopkick, the climate is much more favorable. “At the end of the day,” said Huang. “Indoor location is coming.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The next fronter in location technology could be your supermarket.

Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm, and 19 other companies are working together in a new indoor location-focused venture called In-Location.

Using a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, indoor location technology allows for a much finer degree of precision than what’s available with current technology. This in turn means applications far more impressive than just indoor navigation.

With the partnership, the member companies aim to invest in and create use cases for indoor location services, which they aim to put in consumer devices by next year.

Indoor location has been getting a lot of interest as of late, with companies like Google and CSR already making moves with the technology. CSR has been demoing the technology for months, though the new joint venture aims to take its efforts even further.

One big potential use is allowing smartphone users to broadcast their locations on a more exact level, allowing friends to find them in crowds with minimal fuss (think about what this will mean for services like Foursquare). Retailers could also make use of the technology by using apps to direct customers to products at specific parts of their stores. It’s all about precision.

Here’s the full list of the alliance’s members:

Broadcom, CSR, Dialog Semiconductor, Eptisa, Geomobile, Genasys, Indra, Insiteo, Nokia, Nomadic Solutions, Nordic Semiconductor, Nordic Technology Group, NowOn, Primax Electronics, Qualcomm, RapidBlue Solutions, Samsung Electronics, Seolane Innovation, Sony Mobile Communications, TamperSeal AB, Team Action Zone and Visioglobe.