The Competition of Indoor Navigation
I believe most of you have the same experience that I have. When you fist step in a new building, airport or school, you will feel loss and do not know what to do first and where to go. For example, you are in a hospital. It is difficult for you to find the place you want to go. Many hospital use a not that effective way to solve this problem, of course, it does not work at most of the time. They just set different kinds of sign post or just use different colors to guide people. However, now we have a really nice way to solve this problem, using intelligent map system in mobile phone. It makes it's easy to find some places in a building and other indoor places.
In the latest Android map, it includes US IKEA and Macy's and other 18 airport's detailed layout. Almost at the same time, Nokia announced they will release indoor map suing Bluetooth 4.0. Although use two totally different technology, we can smell that the war of indoor map is already begin.
For a long time, Bluetooth has a poor reputation. It maybe because that the headphone looks not like a human or something else. It makes people feel weird. However, Bluetooth is actually a really nice technology: powerful, simple, cheap. And it will be much more smart after the release of Bluetooth 4.0. Nokia's Location Extension Protocol uses the connection of locator transmitter on the ceiling and Bluetooth 4.0. And triangulation method that is similar to GPS. Through this way, your mobile phone can find the place you want to go accurately. It is said that the degree of precision is less than 8 inches.
Nokia has spent over one billion euros and hope this breakthrough technology will bring superiority in the competiton of indoor map. They have also discovered the different application of this tech, from game to indoor navigation. Nokia is now trying their best to persuade Bluetooth SIG to make one uniform standard and hope this kind of mobile phone can come out into market in 2013.
Just like that if there is no specific map, GPS can not work, the indoor navigation system can not work without a detailed architectural and structural drawings. Now Google allows uses to upload or add architectural and structural drawings to Google Maps as they do the same to SketchUp. This is a simple process, users just need upload the picture of the floor's layout and then connect with satellite images of Google Maps. Through this way, Google not only gets many users' support, uploading indoor maps data day and night, they also uses the data for other users, such as services based on location and ads based on location.
What I have said above is not considering the crime, privacy and other safe question. People are now really sensitive to Google Street View. I believe this kind of indoor map data will bring bigger controversy. In conclusion, we need indoor navigation when we are in a strange building to find places fast. However, we need to use it carefully. Hope Google and Nokia will solve these problems and provide us indoor navigation one day.
Article author
About the Author
Further reading
Further Reading
Article
What to Consider When Adopting Multi-Tenancy in Kubernetes?
Organizations are starting to scale their cloud native operations. And as they do, the inefficiency of managing dozens of isolated clusters has become an evident problem. As the clusters continue to sprawl, businesses must unite diverse workloads onto shared infrastructure. This is because companies need better resource utilization and centralized governance among other things. But it is imperative to remember that going from a single tenant to a multi-tenant environment need
March 12, 2026
Article
Product Engineering Services: Driving Faster Development for Startups
It has been for everyone to see the short product lifecycles and a pressing need for rapid technical scalability that have come to define the modern startup ecosystem. For early-stage companies, the challenge is no longer just conceptualizing a solution. But they must also carry it out with enough precision to withstand high market volatility and fierce competition. We know that internal teams concentrate on core business strategy and fundraising. That still leaves us with th
March 12, 2026
Article
Why Modern Facilities Rely on Environmental Monitoring and Remote Temperature Probes for Compliance and Control
In today’s regulated and data-driven environments, organizations are under constant pressure to ensure that temperature and environmental conditions remain within defined limits. Even small fluctuations can result in product loss, compliance violations, or operational downtime. As a result, many facilities are moving away from manual checks and standalone sensors and adopting comprehensive environmental monitoring solutions instead. An environmental monitor provides rea
March 5, 2026
Article
Role of Data Warehousing in Ensuring Data Quality and Consistency
Organizations have come to rely heavily on large amounts of data in today's competitive markets. But to what end? For starters, to inform strategic decisions and power machine learning models. It goes without saying that the value of these digital assets is completely dependent on the accuracy of the underlying data. So, when data is fragmented or inconsistent across departments, you will obviously have inaccurate reporting and operational inefficiencies at your hands. This c
March 2, 2026