The great (relatively) untapped kingdom of 'indoor wireless' may be the next great frontier?

With expectations of WiFi connectivity for just about any business we visit these days, there is no reason this next step for making the physical world more accessible should not be adopted.  Indoor location services offer the chance for us to use our ever-present smart devices to navigate large facilities easier than ever before.  This also represents great opportunity for retail to touch (and measure) customers better than ever before as the struggle between bricks and mortar vs. online shopping continues.

Fierce Broadband Wireless covered the recent Qualcomm and Cisco announcement around Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint and you can see how this continues to heat up.  It is valuable for so many reasons.

Cisco had issued formal announcements around some interesting stuff done with Fernbank Museum and Copenhagen airport back in November.  It was actually this work and other interesting collaboration with Meridian that drove us produce this Spotlight on the MSE.

https://youtu.be/H3Zjyz9EQO0

The MSE is Cisco's Mobility Services Engine which centralizes much of the control and interface for services like this (and others).

Cisco's recent acquisition of ThinkSmart Technologies signals that we are obviously going to take this even further moving forward.  TechCrunch finds this an interesting acquisition for us and I would have to agree.

Jimmy Ray covered this with a demo from Prashanth Shenoy.

There really is no reason to not do everything you can in this space.  It's an exciting time to take technologies like this and ask yourself, 'how can we be smarter about our business.'  We are going to see multiple technologies formerly considered distinct disciplines merge and make this even richer.  Case in point: Video Surveillance. What a boring old business...or is it?  Check out Guido Jouret's blog entry here as he seemingly is just talking about an update to Cisco's Video Surveillance Manager...but the conversation has really changed.  We are working on a new show for this very topic...I can't wait to share it with you.

Further watching/reading:

Fundamentals of the Cisco Mobility Services Engine

Design Guide for Location Services Architecture

Thanks as always!

Robb

techwisetv.com, fundamentals.techwisetv.com, blog.techwisetv.com,facebook.com/techwise, twitter

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