Apple Acquires Indoor GPS Technology, But What About Indoor Maps?

Apple has confirmed that it acquired WiFiSLAM on March 22.  IndoorLBS has been following and reporting on both companies in our market report. WiFiSLAM was a 5 person, two year old company.  WiFiSLAM uses existing wireless networks to allow smartphones to pinpoint its location to within 2.5m using WiFi signals already present in buildings, which is referred to as RF Fingerprinting or a WiFi site survey. In addition, the phone’s internal compass and accelerometer also play a role in determining its location. WiFiSLAM  envisioned the technology enabling step-by-step indoor navigation, product-level retail customer engagement, and social networking based on proximity.

This indoor location technology will most likely end up in Apple Maps. But wait, how will Apple do RF Fingerprinting without having indoor maps of venues?! Existing indoor WiFi location positioning systems require the system to have the building floorplan in place before RF Fingerpriting site surveying can take place. However, WiFiSLAM technology is next-gen! WiFiSLAM not only maps out the RF Fingerprint, but also the floorplan (or pathways) too! SLAM refers to "Eliminating the site survey step" that is required by most existing indoor WiFi localization systems. This approach beats Google at its own game! Apple will map out the indoor world using crowd-sourcing at a much higher level than Google; Instead of needing to collect building floorplans first in order to record RF Fingerprints, Apple will use millions of iPhone users to map out pathways people walk inside buildings and tie that with the RF Fingerprinting.  It's to be seen if Apple can really map out all indoor spaces (and keep them updated) using this method that depends on people actually walking through all the hallways, staircases, etc in a building.   Watch this video starting at 30min 33secs:

It will be also interesting to see when Apple will offer this indoor location API to developers, similar to what it has done with its Apple Maps API and existing Location APIs.

WiFiSLAM founders included Joseph Huang, Jessica Tsoong, Darin Tay, Dave Millman.  WiFiSLAM investors included Sky Dayton, Naval Ravikant, Felix Shpilman, Don Dodge, Kevin Talbot.  Congrats to all!