The friendswhere app will allow visitors to navigate and share their whereabouts indoors at MWC, as well as elsewhere around the world. This app showcases the highly accurate and cost-effective indoor location enabled by sensewhere's revolutionary self-correcting, self-generating indoor location database, and requires nothing more than the standard wireless technology inside most Android phones to work.
sensewhere’s highly-accurate indoor location MWC floorplan, mapped within sensewhere’s friendswhere app, achieves world-leading indoor location fixes using whatever RF references are readily-available, without the need for additional infrastructure, sensors or ‘fingerprinting’ of locations. It also works outdoors, providing the 'missing link' that seamlessly bridges the indoor and outdoor location experience.
Traditional indoor location technologies demand costly direct mapping of locations, (so-called 'war-driving'), are inaccurate and/or degrade in accuracy over time, or require expensive sensor networks to be installed in a building. sensewhere, on the other hand, dynamically self-generates its own database using whatever RF infrastructure is already in place.
When a consumer uses any sensewhere-enabled application or hardware, their device automatically maps the local RF topography and updates the overall system. sensewhere’s system cheaply and dynamically creates an almost limitless proprietary global RF location database that self-corrects with use and continuously improves in quality.
“Other companies have made huge inroads into the indoor market, chasing the vast money-making potential of advertising and other location-related services. And we’re grateful to them,” commented Rob Palfreyman, CEO, sensewhere. “The market has never been so ready for a workable solution.
“RF beacon indoor positioning has been done before, of course. Yet there’s been a sense, up to now, that the technology hasn’t been quite ‘there’ yet. Problems such as shifting RF beacons, difficulties in keeping indoor maps accurate, and the cost of deploying additional infrastructure, have held the industry back.
The fact that our system is self-generating / self-correcting is the real 'secret of the sauce', combined with our super-accurate proprietary algorithms. We have, essentially, overcome all the limitations of previous systems to remove every barrier to entry. sensewhere is cost-effective, accurate, highly-available and, best of all, doesn't require a big up-front investment.
Now OS suppliers, operators, handset OEMs, social networks and app developers, so long held back by vague and inexact indoor positioning information, can finally start to capitalise on the vast money-making opportunities of indoor location.”
As a user moves through their in-building environment, the sensewhere system takes a matter of seconds to locate them using available RF reference points. Whether the building has been mapped previously or not, an individual's location-fix becomes more accurate over time. In fact, once a few sensewhere users have passed nearby, or even a single user has used the app to navigate around the building the system will have built up a sense of its surroundings and can locate you accurately.