Being able to pinpoint your location on a smartphone using GPS has become a pivotal feature for mobile apps and services. In addition to the obvious use for finding your way around using Google Maps or similar, many apps are now available which use information about your location to filter information that is relevant to you.
FourSquare is one of the most successful names in this area, allowing users to find out whether their friends are around, find useful information about their surrounding area, or receive offers from stores that are close by, and Facebook Places helped the technology to gain popularity, but there are many other similar services: Ask Around is a directory service which allows the user to capitalise on local knowledge when in a new area, NearbyFeed gives you a feed of news and weather relevant to you local area. More imaginative location-based services include, StreetSpark, a location based dating service, and a number of interesting games which use local data to populate your game world, such as MyTown, or even turn the map into a playing-field such as in Shadow Cities.
Unsurprisingly, retailers have realised that there is great potential for attracting people to stores. There are already a number of apps which send users offers and deals relevant to their local area, such as Google Shopping and MyVoucherCodes. It would be advantageous, though, if shops and retails could detect when customers were actually in the store, not just nearby – retailers could give incentives for customers to visit the stores by rewarding them just for going into the shop… And this is where the technology has it’s limitations. GPS is accurate down to about 10 metres in some cases, but phone signal and GPS accuracy is less reliable in built up areas, or indoors.
This represents a new hurdle for location-based services - accurately identifying where the user is, even in built up areas, and whether or not the user is actually inside a specific store or location. A number of methods have already been used to detect when a user is in the vicinity, such as sending a signal by bluetooth, or designing the smartphone app to recognise which WiFi hotspots it can pick up.
A truly innovative approach to this problem was employed in ShopKick – they use the microphone on the device to detect a sound that is played in the store, but is inaudible to the human ear. This means that if the user is running the app, they can be ‘checked-in’ as soon as they are close enough to pick up the signal. The advantage of this system is that the sound signal obeys the physical boundaries of the store – ie, the signal will not go through walls like a WiFi signal, so the app will not get confused if two adjacent stores are using the system. Of course, this system will only work for locations that have the system installed.
This is a technology which we are very interested in at Scribble, and a particularly interesting one for clients in retail and development. Google has already started a massive effort to add large indoor public spaces such as airports and shopping centers. Clearly, some new infrastructure will be required, but the technology is being developed to add a new level of detail to the location services we currently use.