Why STMicroelectronics bought projector start-up BTendo

We've written a number of times about an R&D collaboration between STMicroelectronics and an Israeli company called BTendo that's developed leading technology for scanning laser projection. Their collaboration, combining BTendo's projection technology with STMicroelectronics MEMS expertise, has developed a pico-projector component designed for phones and other electronic devices.

Earlier this month the news broke that STMicroelectronics has acquired BTendo.

We wrote about their projection component back in March, reporting on the new trend in cellphone projectors at MWC. Their prototype showed the projector in action as a distinct device, but their target is to have the component embedded into cellphones and other devices.

Their specs are similar to those of the Samsung's Galaxy Beam. They're targeting 12-15 Lumens, and resolution anywhere from SVGA up to WXG. This component could be the way that other cellphone makers will catch up to Samsung in equipping phones with projectors.

Grizzly Analytics has long felt that cellphones with embedded projectors would have a huge potential in the consumer content-consumption area. Projectors have usually been discussed for business users, but I think that the new generation of mobile movie-watchers and movie-sharers will enjoying having a projector in their pockets.

The biggest question is why ST chose to acquire BTendo now. Is the tipping point coming for cellphone projectors? Does ST have deals in the works for embedding their projector technology into new cellphones?

As even more far-out speculation, we've long suspected that the upcoming iPhone 5 will have something really new. Apple has a way of getting analysts and pundits to think about the incremental improvements, and then throw out a radically new thing. Will September's news about the iPhone 5 include a projector? Will it be based on technology from ST? Only time will tell..... But if it's not Apple, it going to be someone else who brings this great new pico-projector component to market.

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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