Indoor Location with Automatic Crowdsourcing Technology

Pole Star has unveiled ‘automatic crowdsourcing’, the next generation of its indoor location solution NAO Campus, capable of crowdsourcing and referencing RF access point data to quickly and remotely deploy and maintain indoor location services. With automatic crowdsourcing, the NAO Campus indoor location service can now be implemented in an entirely new venue without any staff in the field, by collecting users’ smartphone data in order to create the positioning database.

This new method removes entirely the site fingerprinting measurement process. This service is self-maintained through users’ own devices, in a low cost and dynamic way. It also provides the most reliable quality of service by self-referencing data information from diverse users at different moments and automatically corrects the positioning database with regular updates. No help is required from the user, except for agreeing to upload the data. An anonymous data collection process that entirely protects the user’s privacy. This technology can be integrated in existing global applications or directly in a device, allowing the NAO Campus service to scale. It’s now available as a beta version and is being demonstrated to various strategic partners. Its commercial availability is scheduled before the end of 2013 for all Pole Star partners.

This technology is the result of 5 years of intensive innovation from the Pole Star’s team, and is based on the NAO Cloud platform currently in beta test. Pole Star’s patent pending automatic crowdsourcing is the world’s first to overcome the last barriers of indoor location services. It represents a huge milestone in the market for mobile solution providers or device manufacturers wanting to integrate indoor location functionalities in their services, at a large scale.

Pole Star’s automatic blind crowdsourcing technology represents a disruptive innovation in the indoor location market. The company enables its service to scale remotely, in a very short period and for an unlimited number of venues worldwide. Pole Star offers an indoor location solution that answers the mobile location-based services market's main challenge: make indoor location service as simple as GPS to use, available and accessible everywhere. The company is actually in negotiations with large customers and partners to implement NAO Campus worldwide on a multi-site basis, said Christian Carle, the CEO of Pole Star.

Blind crowdsourcing is an additional feature integrated in Pole Star’s NAO Cloud. An indoor location one-stop shop platform which includes the NAO Campus field-proven tool suite and the NAO Campus hybrid location engine, which combines all available source of data to determine the most accurate indoor location: using smartphone motion sensors, Wi-Fi, GPS and BLE 4.0 signals. It enables

Pole Star’s partners to integrate indoor location in their mobile services in complete autonomy.

In addition to the NAO Cloud platform, Pole Star will offer an alternative Business Model based on a subscription approach (ILaaS: Indoor Location as a Service), depending on the number of sites covered. A solution that answers the need of multi-site coverage for marketing agencies, telecom operators, integrators and the entire location-based services ecosystem.