How companies are trying to deliver location

For now, to get this capability the company placing the beacons must use Estimote, and apps that want to take advantage of it must use the Estimote Location SDK to build anything useful. Then, the consumer has to have an app on his or her phone in order to get information.

Thus, this setup might make more sense in an enterprise or corporate office setting where beacons are less likely to get moved and users are compelled to download an application.

Citrix is using less sophisticated tools to map location for its customers. Actually, it is using three. The first is geofencing by using an employee getting on a corporate Wi-Fi network as a means to trigger events such as a computer booting up.

This is a fairly blunt tool and requires the employees to run a work app on their phone, so Citrix is also using GPS and NFC as other ways to get an employee’s location.

The GPS tool works much like the Wi-Fi geofence, but tracks employee location everywhere (so it might be more beneficial in larger campus settings). It’s also a potential employee privacy concern.

NFC is more interesting, although it requires a physical badge and NFC readers around a building. Citrix lets people use their NFC-based badge to log into conference rooms or patient examining rooms in a hospital setting. The system can then pull up whatever relevant data they need based on the type of room they are in. Patients in some hospitals might get their own NFC badge to log into the room as well.

In May, Google showed off how Lowe’s is using Project Tango, its computer vision and augmented reality platform, to show customers where specific items were kept in the store. That location tech relies on indoor positioning plus the phone’s camera to understand what it is seeing to figure out where in the store the person is in relation to the item they want. The downside of this method for determining location is that it only works well for stock that doesn’t change often and customers must download an app.In the year ahead we’re going to see a lot of other options for location mapping. In the home, companies offering mesh Wi-Fi routers are able to tell customers generally where a phone is based on the Wi-Fi access point it has connected to. Hospitals have also used this type of solution to track where crash carts and equipment are.

Another option that is filling a gap are the network of Bluetooth-based trackers out there from companies like Tile and TrackR that rely on a network effect of a large user base to show location. This method works well in urban and crowded areas for tracking objects, but it’s not granular enough to see where something is in a building, nor is it great where there aren’t a lot of users of the trackers.

And of course, there are a variety of cellular-based options that use GPS and gateways for tracking cars or expensive goods across the supply chain.

Quality location devices are likely to remain highly fragmented and dependent on specific use cases. The most interesting advances right now are being made indoors, where companies are trying to understand where both people and things are. The ideal solutions will need to scale across many locations easily, won’t be dependent on an app and will enable tracking of both things and people. When it comes to people, it should be flexible enough that it can differentiate between roles, such as a doctor or patient or customer and employee.

That’s a tall order, but it’s a big need to get to the future of contextual computing.