Download Presentation: 22-The New Era of Location Tracking-Ludovic Privat-CROWDLOC
Asset tracking with GPS has been around for 15 years, but with its high power consumption, short autonomy and high cost, the traditional GPS and cellular combination is not relevant for a lot of today use cases in IoT.
Even new options such as GPS and LPWAN (i.e. Sigfox or LoRa) associations are not perfectly playing the part for a number of use cases where size and battery consumption matter. Then comes a new range of players, B2C startups such as Tile, TrackR, Chipolo and Wistiki that produce and sell Bluetooth LE tags to attach to the assets that needs to be located. These companies mutualize the service so that each consumer is geolocating the assets of all the others. Bluetooth LE technology has the obvious advantage to cost a lot less and to require far less power than the others while being embedded in 99% of smartphones. However, this technology approach leads to a new obstacle, which is to build a wide enough community. Because Tile, TrackR and others do it by selling hardware, the process is very slow. And in the meantime their offer is incomplete and doesn’t fully satisfy the consumers or needs. To answer these market requirements CROWDLOC imagined a different approach. Producing only a software solution in a B2B business model, CROWDLOC is building its community by implementing its SDK in the mobile applications of its partners. The CROWDLOC Alliance formed by this community can then geolocates 24/7 the assets of all its members, using the signal of Bluetooth tags and Bluetooth-enabled devices.
(CROWDLOC technology is currently in production for Android phones and the iOS version of our SDK will be released before Where Camp 2017). Our presentation will focus on the history of location tracking, the pros and cons of each technology (cost, power consumption, size, accuracy, indoor/outdoor) and the wide market opportunity (B2C & B2B) offered by drastically lowering the cost of location tracking.