“The best time is always right now; the best place is always right here.” While this is a great philosophy for living life, it is also very applicable to wireless. That is because mobile users have become accustomed to high speed connectivity that allows instantaneous access to information, coupled with smart applications that take advantage of location for personalized services.
Ironically, the above has been easier to deliver via a carrier network than over business-owned indoor wireless networks. While indoor networks have faster throughput speeds, they have traditionally lacked a mechanism for accurate (and cost effective) location services. Until now…
The Power of the “Blue Dot”
The holy grail of IT is to deliver users exactly what they want, when they want it. To achieve this, hospitals, schools, stores, corporations, museums and more all need the ability to provide a “blue dot” experience.
Let’s put this in context. In the old days, if you wanted to take a road trip you had to fill your glove box with a dozen maps. (Who remembers the old AAA TripTik or Mapquest printouts?) While useful, they were not very flexible, and definitely didn’t tell you when you made a wrong turn or were heading for nasty traffic, let alone where the closest gas station or restaurant was to your current location. Fast forward to today, where modern navigation systems like Google and Waze map your location to an x,y coordinate that changes in real-time – a concept known as a “blue dot”. This information is then supplemented with other real-time data based on the context of your location – delivering you the best service possible based on your needs (and sometimes providing recommendations that you never even considered!)
Now imagine what life would be like if this blue dot experience was extended to indoors – i.e in malls, airports, hotels, convention centers, retails stores, hospitals, college campuses, and more. Wherever you are, you could get personalized greetings, turn-by-turn directions, proximity-based messages, real-time deals, and more. It’s like having a personalized concierge in your pocket whose sole job is to deliver an amazing wireless experience that is customized to your needs.
Making Indoor Location a Reality
One of the goals of Mist is to bring indoor location services to the masses. Our wireless platform delivers many of the key elements associated with delivering a highly accurate, highly responsive blue dot experience. Furthermore, we eliminate many of the challenges that have held back indoor location deployments to date, such as managing physical BLE beacons and performing expensive BLE site surveys. (To learn more about our BLE location services, here is a great whitepaper)
But we can’t do it alone. It takes a village to deliver accurate and reliable indoor location services, which is why we announced the new Mist BLE alliance today. The Mist BLE Alliance is a broad network of ecosystem companies who are collaborating to provide thought leadership around BLE, while ensuring the seamless interoperability of various BLE components with Mist’s wireless platform.
We are thrilled to be working with the best vendors in the location space to integrate their mapping, application development, navigation, marketing, and scheduling technologies with the Mist wireless platform. Our common goal is to facilitate the adoption of indoor location services across numerous industries, including healthcare, retail, hospitality, and education.
We encourage you to check out our new technology partner page, where you can see a list of all the vendors we are working with in the Mist BLE alliance (which are too numerous to name here). Also on this page are joint solution sheets that show how these products seamlessly work with the Mist wireless platform.
The world is ready for indoor location services. With the Mist BLE alliance, you are too.