Traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores have many disadvantages when competing against online counterparts. Online stores are always open and are available anywhere, have “endless aisles” and can use digital tools to personalize offers to customer preferences. Nevertheless, physical stores do offer customers a number of significant benefits, including immediacy, personal service, and the ability to offer a truly immersive experience. Recently, however, leading physical stores have discovered that they can also harness the power of powerful digital marketing tools and integrate them directly into the in-store experience.
The Wi-Fi equipment serving offices, airports, and other large buildings could be easily upgraded to allow mobile devices to get indoor location fixes to an accuracy of less than half a meter, Stanford researchers have shown. The technology, dubbed SpotFi, could lead to GPS-style maps for indoor spaces.
GPS doesn’t work indoors. Can a bat-like echolocation system take its place?
The satellite-based global positioning system has revolutionised the way humans interact with our planet. But a serious weakness is that GPS doesn’t work indoors. Consequently, researchers and engineers have been studying various ways to work out position in doors in a way that is simple and inexpensive.
Smartphones locate themselves outdoors using a GPS sensor, but those signals are blocked indoors. A new technique uses a device’s camera to get an indoor location fix to an accuracy of within a meter. The technique could enable new kinds of apps, and may be particularly valuable for wearable computers such as Google Glass.
Hace escasas semanas, durante el Mobile World Congresscelebrado en Barcelona, el presidente de Google, Eric Schmidt, al referirse a los últimos avances de la telefonía móvil, afirmó que "ahora, nadie se pierde". Aunque la frase no es del todo cierta, la verdad es que, si uno lleva un teléfono avanzado (smartphone) es casi imposible perderse. Basta con abrir la aplicación de mapas del móvil para saber al instante donde está uno y en qué dirección debe caminar para llegar a su destino.
