Month: August 2012

Categories
Business Strategy Research & Development

Who is Leading Us Indoors?

Financial analysts' blogs are not on my list of top reads this summer so I was surprised to find myself reading this fresh post on SeekingAlpha. It is a thorough research study on the potential revenue to be generated from Nokia's patent portfolio. After describing how much Nokia has invested in R&D in the past 10+ years, the headline "Location Based Mapping Patents Are Hidden Jewel of Nokia Patent Portfolio" appears and the analyst jumped directly to the topic of indoor positioning.

Indoor positioning has been an increasingly important topic for my research. I'm not alone in discovering that there will be a large value stream to come on the basis of positioning users more accurately indoor (as well as outdoor) so the potential for innovation in this space is going to be huge. Well, that is if there are not already patents protecting such innovations and their future use. 

I found this post on Forbes to shed a lot of insights into the thoughts I had when I saw the Nokia and Groupon deal, creating Groupon Now! Of course, the Forbes post is more in depth and valuable. Here are a few points that this blogger extracted from the Grizzly Analytics report published in December 2011:

Of the five leading companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and RIM), Krulwich sees Microsoft and Nokia as the most likely to challenge Google in indoor positioning. He expects Microsoft and Nokia to launch a service sometime in 2012, perhaps tagged to Microsoft’s “Tango” Windows Phone update. Both companies have significant experience in indoor positioning. Microsoft has researched how to determine location using special radio beacons as well as by analyzing Wi-Fi signal strength. It has also experimented with what Krulwich calls movement tracking. That involves tracking a device as it moves away from a known location, such as a door to a building (which can be pinpointed via GPS because it is outdoors).

Beyond its research, Microsoft holds granted patents in indoor positioning. Krulwich counted at least five Microsoft patents related to determining phone location using wireless access points, radio beacons, device movements and other radio signals.

Nokia’s indoor positioning work is equally sophisticated with patents going back to at least 2006. In September 2006, Nokia filed a patent on “Direction of Arrival” detection. That strategy leverages ultra-wideband (UWB) radio technology to estimate location. In fall 2007, Nokia also filed three patents related to determining location via Wi-Fi signal strength.

Although Krulwich's prediction that Microsoft and Nokia would launch an indoor positioning service in 2012 has not yet been disproven, it's clear that Google has continued to make more noise around indoor than any of the other potential leaders. If Microsoft and Nokia are going to be battling out the indoor future with the likes of Apple, Google/Motorola, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, among others who have also written or read the writing on the walls, Microsoft and Nokia will need to acquire or partner with those who have a much higher rate of success in the mobile market.

Where does all this interest in the indoor mobile positioning space lead us? To finding and working with small innovative companies that have the potential to either implement well on the patents of others, or to generate new intellectual property for indoor positioning and, in either case, be acquired by one of the five major companies leading users of mobile services indoors.

Who are you and how can I help?

Categories
Internet of Things Research & Development Social and Societal

Even Minnesotans know about RFID

I don't have anything for or against Minnesota, but why would this little known state come up twice in a few days? This merits a little examining.

Earlier this week a friend of mine who lived in Minneapolis in the early 90s was telling me that upon her recent visit there she was amazed at the vibrant community living there. Is that why in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, 78.2% of eligible Minnesotans voted – the highest percentage of any U.S. state – versus the national average of 61.7%? I guess this could be a relevant factoid in a US presidential election year.

Then, I discovered that the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and Seoul National University have recently released a study on the use of three things that are squarely on my radar: smartphones, social networks, and "things" (in this case packages using RFID). And, if that wasn't enough to catch your attention, there's also a "green" component to this study. According to this article on the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment's web site:

The study used spatial and agent-based models to investigate the potential environmental benefits of enlisting social networks and smartphones to help deliver packages. While sensitive to how often trusted and willing friends can be found in close proximity to both the package and the recipient within a day, results indicate that very small degrees of network engagement can lead to very large efficiency gains.

Compared to a typical home delivery route, greenhouse gas emissions reductions from a socially networked pickup system were projected to range from 45 percent to 98 percent, depending on the social connectedness of the recipients and the willingness of individuals in their social networks to participate. System-wide benefits could be significantly lower under assumptions of less than 100% market adoption, however. In fact, the study points out that many of the gains might be nullified in the short term as fewer home truck deliveries make existing delivery systems less efficient. But, “with only 1-2% of the network leveraged for delivery, average delivery distances are improved over conventional delivery alone – even under conditions of very small market penetration,” the study concluded.

“What is important is that sharing be allowed in the system, not how many ultimately choose to share time or resources,” says study co-author Timothy Smith, director of IonE’s NorthStar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise. “We find that providing the relatively few really inefficient actors in the network the opportunity to seek the help of many better positioned actors can radically improve performance.” This is particularly relevant today, Smith says, as online retailers such as Amazon begin introducing delivery pickup lockers in grocery, convenience and drug stores.

Perhaps there is, indeed, a natural link between voter participation and social networking for your local package delivery: if a citizen is more involved in the well being of the community and wants to vote, perhaps the same person will also be open to making small detours for the purpose of delivering a package and protecting the environment.

I suspect that the speakers about NFC and RFID at the upcoming IoT Zurich meetup event will be touching on this topic of citizens using their smartphones with near field communications, but probably not for the same applications. 

Categories
Innovation Internet of Things

Computer Vision on a Programmable Flying Board

Producing video content is said to be the way of the future. Every time I've attempted to develop a short video, I've found it difficult, orders of magnitude more effort than simply posting 500 words in a blog (and that is more difficult that it sounds). How are we going to overcome the barriers to video publishing? Perhaps a flying smart camera?

There will be many new tools coming out to help people who capture their lives (more or less continually) with video. For example, if using the Google Project Glass device, a person could log their lives (and their baby's life) and accumulate content quickly. But I've discovered since I started wearing the Looxcie X2 camera that it's not the capture of video that's the most difficult, it's making sense of it!

I'm bringing up these points because they converge precisely with a post I saw on TechCrunch. When the editors at TechCrunch announced in May that they were starting a series on "makers," as those who build hardware for business or pleasure are called in our circles, I perked up. In only the fourth episode, I learned about something that hits two of my key words: computer vision and programmable board.

The company featured in this video segment is Centeye, the maker of computer vision chips that have become the basis of the ArduEye, an open source project putting machine learning computer vision on Arduino.

Why is this important? Because it demonstrates that making sense of the video can be done with very little computational overhead. This diagram compares the vision chip with a CMOS camera that pushes all the pixels it captures to a CPU for storage or analysis (click on the figure to see an enlargement):

Now, this alone might not get your interest, however, in order to demonstrate the advantages of the low power/low computational overhead they put the board on a set of blades and made it into helicopter. You need to watch this video!

This might remind you of the Parrot AR Drone, but it's better because it doesn't require an iPhone.

Perhaps, in the place of or in addition to an HD camera on a pair of glasses, there could be a vision chip that helps to edit the captured content. This is already done in head mounted cameras for the defense sector, I'm told, however, it must be produced at low cost, low weight and low power consumption for the rest of us to benefit from these breakthroughs. I hope to see these chips used more widely when there are more people doing projects with ArduEye.

Categories
3D Information Business Strategy

Business Models for Indoor Positioning

Given its low penetration in today's smartphone-focused world (16% of 2011 smartphone sales, down from 33% in 2010, according to IDC) and its recent difficulties, Nokia is not frequently listed as a technology leader in 2012. But it is too soon to dismiss the company entirely.

Its deal with Groupon is worthy of note as an alternative to relying on device sales as a future revenue model.  Though it's not the first company to think of advertising as a business model, and advertising is my least preferred business model, having a robust indoor and close-proximity-to-point-of-sale technology will be highly strategic and might change advertising into something less distasteful.

The "Groupon Now!" service for Nokia Lumina smartphones (currently only available in the United States) works outdoor as well as indoor. The really big potential is to use the device's precise location to target highly appropriate messages to its owner/user. When I say "highly appropriate" I mean to target a notification based on so many factors about the user's current situation, that the advertising becomes an anticipatory service.

An "anticipatory service" is basically anything that is provided to a user just prior to their needing it in daily work or personal life in a way that it provides unprecedented levels of benefit. An existing anticipatory service is a routing service on GPS devices that takes a user around a traffic jam before you arrive in the traffic itself. Another is an alert when you are approaching the expiration date of your contract with an important merchant or service provider. As simple and common place as anticipatory services may seem today, they are not (often) based on user location and they rarely alert a user at the point of sale (i.e., a location).

Nokia's CTO office had its eye on Indoor Positioning-based services many years ago. When Nokia acquired Gate5 and Navteq it significantly increased its assets in the location and positioning technology space. Here's a 2009 video of Brett Murray talking about anticipatory services driven by indoor positioning.

If there's a company that needs to adopt a new business model, it has to be Nokia. I hope that this company's indoor positioning technology portfolio will help it either directly, through relationships directly with the providers of anticipatory services, like Groupon, or indirectly by licensing its patents to others who will be leveraging indoor position as one of the key triggers for notifications.

It will just need to do it quickly in order to beat Apple and Google to the punch line.