Indoor location services are poised to be the next hot mobile service with its ability to enable smarter mobile offers and more accurate local searches and offers too many advantages for mobile technology companies to pass up.
Apple wants to deploy a service that can help engage with customers inside retail venues by offering offers based on user's behavior and preferences, i.e., search history, indoor location, product price, and NFC. Apple's recent patent filings and patents acquired from Xerox dating back to 1998 indicate Apple's interest in location based services for serving relevant ads/offers to users. Apple also wants iPhone users to be able to receive other relevant content such as restaurant menu when user approaches the restaurant.
Amazon wants to predict what customers might want to buy by tracking user's location, including inside stores or malls. Amazon's latest patent indicates Amazon is interested in user's movement patterns to be able to engage with customers on their next shopping trip by serving relevant offers. The patent says, “by analyzing the recent movements of a mobile device user among stores in a shopping mall, it may be determined that a particular store is a predicted next destination for the mobile device user.”
For more, see the market report on the Indoor Location Services industry. Click here.
