Great article on Nokia patent portfolio

There's a great article on SeekingAlpha analyzing Nokia's patent portfolio and their likely ability to profit from it as the mobile industry continues to develop.

One of the key points in the article is the strength of Nokia's location technologies, including indoor location. The article writes:

Location Based Mapping Patents Are Hidden Jewel of Nokia Patent PortfolioOne emerging and potentially highly profitable area in which Nokia has a distinct patent advantage is indoor-mapping. This technology is vital to the expected future trends of mobile advertising which will come to directly target individual users based on their proximity to retail locations within malls and other large indoor locations. ...
Google was the first company to unveil a version of this new technology on current smart devices, with the "My Location," feature within the November 2011 release of "Google Maps 6 for Android." Despite being the first to release this technology in a platform compatible with current mobile devices, a December 2011 report on the particular indoor-positioning patent holdings of each major technology company by the research firm Grizzly Analytics found that Google held an alarmingly low amount of indoor-positioning relevant patents. The firm ranked the companies by the breadth of their research and the number of years they've been working on indoor positioning, said founder Bruce Krulwich in an interview for a December 2011 Forbes magazine article on this topic...
With the two strongest indoor-positioning patent portfolios, the Grizzly Analytics report concluded that the Microsoft and Nokia partnership puts the two companies in prime position to dominate this potentially monumental growth industry, "if Microsoft and Nokia pool their mapping assets, as they have pledged to do in upcoming Windows Phone devices, they could offer the industry's strongest indoor positioning service. Both have made such investments in this area, they would have a leg up if they can get a combined system out to market," said Krulwich.

The article also looks closely at Nokia's patent holdings in the 4G/LTE area. Definitely worth a read.

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware. The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies , released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption. Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-

The year indoor location will truly take off

For years I've been writing sentences like "this will be the year that indoor location will explode into the market." I, and many others, have been expecting indoor location technology to enable the huge range of location-enabled apps, which currently work only outside where GPS signals are available, to work inside. But until now the promise of indoor location has remained a promise. But if we look at the reasons for this, we'll see that it is about to change. 2017 and 2018 are poised to be the years that the challenges keeping indoor location from going mainstream will be solved. First is accuracy. Most indoor location technologies until a year or so ago had accuracy in the range of 4 to 8 meters. This sounds good in principle, and in fact is better than GPS in many cases. But GPS systems are able to use road details to hide their inaccuracies, so that the blue dot seems to follow your driving car almost perfectly. But indoors, this sort of inaccuracy means y

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible. I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving. This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest. (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States. (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .) So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions. (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice. (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what

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