Apple has embarked on an ambitious program to use the sensors in its iPhones to map the large indoor areas of stores, offices, event spaces and commercial buildings, according to Onyx Beacon CEO Roman Foeckl, who attended Apple’s WWDC conference for developers. (Onyx both markets beacons and provides management software for beacon owners.)
The effort isn’t a secret — Apple has been seeding commercial spaces with its iBeacon technology for months.
But most people don’t know that iBeacon exists, or what it is for. And Apple is using a range of technologies in addition to iBeacon to create its indoor maps. Business Insider asked Apple for comment but we didn’t hear back.
Foeckl says Apple is likely now ahead of Google when it comes to indoor mapping. That is significant because indoor maps will generate revenue in the future for stores and shops in malls and arenas. It could also generate revenue for Apple.
Of course, there are privacy and surveillance issues that the public has not yet begun to understand or debate. It’s one thing to not have privacy while walking down a street in public where anyone can see you. It’s quite another to be tracked inside, behind closed doors, on private premises.
iBeacons are small devices that detect the Bluetooth signal coming from iPhones. They can be used to ping the iPhones of people walking by with offers or useful messages, such as “hey, you’re walking by a Starbucks.” (An example: At a recent wearables hackathon, ReadWrite editor Owen Thomas found his iPhone being pinged by iBeacons continuously.) Some iPhone users have already started to receive lockscreen notifications on their iPhones from Starbucks based on iBeacons.
The indoor map strategy is also interesting because Apple’s last major mapping launch, the Apple Maps app, was a disaster. It was intended to compete against or replace Google Maps for iPhone users, but it turned out to be filled with errors and distortions, some of them hilarious — the Brooklyn Bridge imagery was so twisted it looked like it was collapsing into the East River.
Apple has since fixed Apple Maps, and now it may have a jump on Google in the indoor sector.
“Apple has learned from its mistakes from the initial launch of map services and won’t repeat with launch of indoor mapping,” Foeckl says. “We’ll — For more information read the original article here.
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