A California-based company has bought the rights to indoor navigation technology developed by Skolkovo resident SPIRIT Navigation.
SPIRIT Group, of which the SPIRIT Navigation startup is part, said it had sold all the property rights to the technology to a California-based company for “a global market price,” though it declined to name the U.S. company or the value of the deal under the terms of the agreement, saying only that the California-headquartered company was “in the top three in its market segment.”
A demo video showing SPIRIT Navigation's technology at work within a Moscow mall. Video: SPIRIT Navigation
The indoor navigation technology was developed over a period of two years by a team of 10 programmers at SPIRIT Navigation, a resident of the Skolkovo Foundation’s space and telecoms cluster.
“We gave 25 percent of the company to the developers: that kind of motivation helps to make a world-class product, and helped our best guys to become millionaires,” said Andrei Sviridenko, founder and chairman of the board of SPIRIT, which makes voice, video and conferencing software.
“My father, Professor Vladimir Sviridenko, built the whole system; I only had to sign the contract. No major companies in Russia expressed an interest, and Skolkovo approved the deal, so we received the money and have already invested it in our next world-class innovation,” he said.
Indoor navigation is in demand on the Internet of Things market, in which devices, buildings and other objects are connected to a network and can collect and exchange information. Since satellite signals don’t pass through constructions like roofs, an alternative technology to GPS is needed for indoor navigation. The technology can be used in warehouses, for example, to monitor the location of various goods.
Other potential uses of indoor navigation include guided tours in museums – to provide visitors with information about individual exhibits as they approach them – as well as to help people navigate their way around shopping malls, indoor car parks, airports and train stations. Last but certainly not least, it can play a crucial role in helping rescue workers to find people trapped in buildings in emergencies.
Sviridenko said his company had got a fair price for its technology with the help of Californian investment bankers and lawyers, despite economic sanctions slapped on Russia by the U.S. and other countries over the conflict in Ukraine.
“Technology connected to indoor navigation is popular with investors at the moment,” said Alexei Belyakov, head of Skolkovo’s space and telecoms cluster. SPIRIT Navigation received a grant of 30 million rubles ($466,000 at current exchange rates) from Skolkovo in 2013.
“We supported SPIRIT because their approach doesn’t require the creation of additional infrastructure in the form of tracking devices, which makes it significantly simpler to introduce SPIRIT’s technology to shopping centres,” said Belyakov.
SPIRIT Navigation’s technology does not require WiFi or tracking devices such as iBeacons to be installed in facilities where it is used, and is based instead around what the company calls “sensor fusion”: it uses data from smartphone sensors, such as its gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, barometer and its WiFi/BT radio-sensors.
The technology works with mobile devices operating on both iOS and Android and makes it possible to pinpoint positioning to within one metre inside a building – which is more than 30 times more accurate than WiFi positioning, according to Sviridenko.
Indoor navigation is one of the most promising areas of the hi-tech market and is already worth billions of dollars, largely due to its commercial potential, such as geo-advertising, in which customers receive ads or push notifications about offers and discounts when they are already inside the store, or receive information about a particular product in a store when they approach it. It can also be used to help shoppers find items in large stores more easily. The geo-advertising market is expected to be worth $13 billion by 2018, according to ABI Research.
“Reliable and accurate indoor navigation is as important inside a building as GPS and GLONASS are outside,” said Sviridenko.
SPIRIT’s technology is already used in products made by Apple, BT, Ericsson, HTC, Microsoft, Samsung and many other companies around the world, the company said. SPIRIT Navigation won second prize in the best infrastructure-free navigation for smartphones category at the Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition in Seattle in 2015.