Mobile World Congress Back: Was It Strong for Location Industry?
Halls seemed to be packed, but was it all smoke and mirrors?
BARCELONA—While the Mobile World Congress here drew more of a crowd than last year’s sparse pandemic numbers, many location industry companies either did not attend at all or had a small presence via meeting rooms.
However, attending companies seemed upbeat and used the large smartphone show as a way to reveal how location technology will thrive in a 5G world and beyond. At its press conference, which was made available online, Qualcomm [QCOM] CEO president Cristiano Amon made several announcements, based on Snapdragon Connect, which he says offers true connectivity, not only for cellular, but Bluetooth, Wi-FI and position location.
Previous MWC shows had a number of automotive companies—and many thought it would rival CES as a car tech show. This year’s MWC, however, had a scaled-back presence from auto companies—many of which participated in “smart mobility” panels. In fact, Qualcomm’s Connectivity-as-a-Service feature for Snapdragon Car-to-Cloud Services to support global connectivity was one of the few announcements.
Data was again a big topic at MWC as such companies as Geotab, which draws information from more than 2.6 million connected vehicles worldwide, develops sustainability products for their customers, said Aaron Jarvis, company associate vice president, sales and business development.
“We take massive data and make it relevant, with a Green Fleet Dashboard and machine learning, to someone with fleets of 10 or 100 vehicles. This includes what would be beneficial to a short-stop or long-stop driver,” he said. “We have improved one company’s fleet by reducing 60 percent in carbon emissions.”
MWC allowed Dallas-based Polte to showcase its precise positioning technology among the 5G rollouts and private networks. “Location for 5G private networks is a no-brainer. In Europe, Deutsche Telecom has field tested Polte and found that we are 10-20 times more accurate [than competitors],” said CEO Ed Chao. “Because of 5G, the quality of the networks is getting better. The need for location platforms is increasing.”
Chao said that secure and available location is critical for industrial uses. “In 5G location use cases for industrial you need the best seamless performance,” he said. “Wi-Fi just doesn’t have the range, plus it’s in an unlicensed band. A robot, or other critical device, can’t just stop working.”
In other MWC news:
GSMA, the organizers of MWC, banished Russian companies and shut down the country’s pavilion in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
At least two halls were shut down due to lack of exhibitors (and the existing halls were scaled back.
North American companies seemed to have a smaller presence this year. Mapping companies were scarce.
Nine Potential Buyers Give Sigfox Hope
Nine potential buyers made the Feb. 25 legal deadline to take over Labège, France-based Sigfox. They are Actility, Buffet Investment Services Consortium, Greybull Capital LLP, Heliot Europe Gmbh, Iwire Innovation Management Ltd, OTEIS France, Sentiens, UnaBiz, and Groupe Zekat for Sigfox SA.
Sigfox was placed under a court’s protection from its creditors for six months. However, the company asked a Toulouse court to shorten this period to only three weeks. That period ended last week—and led to speculation whether Sigfox would have a new buyer or will just completely go out of business.
Jeremy Prince, Sigfox CEO, told Location Business News that the company sent a letter out to its operators to tell them about the potential investors. For Sigfox France, seven of the companies came forward, but Actility and Buffet did not participate.
The letter to operators said that “Sigfox's management will discuss with the takeover candidates to improve the content as much as possible in the interest of the company, its employees, and its technology.”
Sigfox, a major IoT player, had its financial woes chronicled by Techcrunch and French Tech Journal. Sigfox posted a net loss of nearly $102 million on revenues of more than $27 million, with $132.8 million in debt, in its annual financial statement.
Swift Navigation and Taoglas Partner at MWC
BARCELONA—Swift Navigation and Taoglas have partnered at the Mobile World Congress to deliver GNSS solutions to mass markets, including autonomous vehicles, automotive, smart mobility and other applications. The Taoglas EDGE Locate IoT platform and EDGE RTK Starter Kit will be pre-integrated with Swift’s Skylark precise positioning service.
Some of the applications for the new product will include such micromobility (scooters), delivery, robotic and industrial customers.
“No one company can delivery this centimeter-level accuracy. Some of the systems provide just regional coverage, or were survey-based, so we looked for two years for the right partner,” said Ronan Quinlan, co-founder and joint CEO of Taoglas. “This is a big deal as we see it going into the Cowboy e-bike, lawn mowers and other customers.”
The integrated solution will make it easier for customers to acquire accurate positioning for IoT-based products, said Swift CEO Timothy Harris.
Harris said the European market has been important for Swift. “We have worked with Deutsche Telecom on precise positioning. Europe, along with the U.S., is developing the next generation of vehicles, and devices, which include premium automotive and construction equipment,” he said.
Location Companies Make Case at MWC
BARCELONA—About two dozen small- to medium-size location companies exhibited at the Mobile World Congress here to offer positioning capability and other features for European markets and beyond.
France-based Nestwave announced that the company’s technology is being integrated into a new all-in-one ultra-efficient narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) chipset from IoT secure hardware and software specialist Trasna Solutions. Developed by Trasna, the Safe-IoT Chipset will offer a fully integrated NB-IoT platform for low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) embedding RISC-V cores for application, security and radio and enabling iSIM and Nestwave GNSS, the company said.
Lund, Sweden-based Traxmate, which exihibited in the 4 Years From Now area of MWC, is offering IoT-based asset tracking using u-blox GNSS modules. The company integrates such tracking and positioning technologies as GPS/GNSS, Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, cellular location and LoRa, said Bjorn Lindquist, Traxmate CEO.
“We are a sister company to Combain, which has been around for more than 10 years, so we can provide much more accurate indoor positioning,” he said. “Industrial markets and pet and asset tracking are areas we have had a lot of interest. Indoor tracking is finally going to take off.”
Another MWC exhibitor, Deeyook, a location-as-a-service (LaaS) company, has invented and patented a tracking solution to determine indoor and outdoor locations of items, assets, and employees. Company CEO and co-founder Gideon Rottem, said the company’s largest market is the supply chain—manufacturing, logistics and retail.
“We are starting in industrial markets, but seeing a lot of interest in healthcare. Tracking 2,000 beds in a hospital is one of them,” he said.
At CES, Infineon Technologies [IFX] and Deeyook announced a partnership to offer location solutions.
Barcelona-based RedGPS is getting more active in the South American fleet tracking markets, said Pedro Braga, the company’s head of sales, at the 4 Years From Now conference at MWC. “We are a software company using GPS and IoT. We offer mobility solutions in Mexico, Argentina and many other countries in Latin America,” he said. “We believe the South American tracking market is very strong right now. We have been working for six years in that market and now starting in Europe.”
In other MWC location news:
Ubiscale announced a “tier one” customer for its Cobalt GNSS IP core that supports GPS, Galileo, and BeiDou as well as smart cloud assistance for
IoT sensors, asset tracking devices and mass-market mobile products such as wearables, animals and goods trackers. “Our customers can definitely supersize the market scope of their next-generation chipset for IoT and get GNSS capability with unprecedented low footprint and optimal cost,” said Samuel Ryckewaert, co-founder and business development manager at Ubiscale.Another company, Loctio, plans to use low-Earth-orbit satellites for positioning. The company’s Cancri location system offloads the GNSS signal processing from an IoT device to the Cloud or Edge, said Lazoros Kapsias, Loctio CEO.
Race to Digitize Building Maps
Artificial Intelligence mapping has made it possible to digitize complex buildings at scale as companies look to re-open workplaces in the wake of the worldwide pandemic. However, keeping indoor maps updated has been a challenge that many companies have to deal with.
One company, Pointr, says it has digitized more than 4 billion square feet for 11 Fortune 100 companies, across 27 countries, in 3,000 buildings.
Live demo of AI-powered mapping technology MapScale (Video: Pointr).
The company has been able to digitize 10,000 floor plans daily, which company founder and CEO Ege Akpinar says has improved over the years. “We have mapped about 2,000 floorplans across the country for Macy’s. They found that updating maps every two years isn’t going to cut it,” he said. “Now we have the ability to update [the indoor maps] every hour based on machine learning patterns in less than a second.”
The technology integrates a digital mapping engine with a building's CAD system, the company said. The algorithms gather such map data as room names, desks, and amenities for conversion into digital maps. With this technology, indoor mapping can help employees, customers, and visitors find their way to a desk that's available, to the closest meeting room, or to the live location of a colleague.
Pointr, with U.S. operations based in Boston and founded in London, is concentrating on the retail, healthcare and workplace markets. The company also has partnerships with United and Delta to map at airports. “Globally, we are at 25 airports,” Akpinar said.
Contact: Marianne Slamich, Pointr, (978) 222-7929, marketing@pointr.tech, www.pointr.tech.
Link Labs Extends Partnership With CIG
Annapolis, Md.-based Link Labs has announced their continued partnership with Cambridge Industries Group (CIG) to focus on relieving supply chain shortages and enhancing IoT asset tracking processes.
Link Labs argues that supply chain disruptions in business can cause as much as 62 percent loss in finances, which can be especially detrimental for industries like hospitality and travel during the pandemic. “Supply chain issues have a domino effect downstream into production issues and management of inventory and work-in-progress. Link Labs and CIG help alleviate downstream problems by providing real-time visibility into where work-in-process is stored, so that it can quickly be brought back into the production area for final assembly,” said Bob Proctor, Link Labs CEO and founder.
In their partnership with CIG, Link Labs has already been working with several top hotel brands in the U.S. to improve their IoT asset tracking, the company said. The company will use its AirFinder OnSite Bluetooth Low Energy/XLE Access Point, AirFinder OnSite Bluetooth Lower Energy Ultrasound-Enabled Beacons, AirFinder OnSite XLE Beacons and custom-built and designed enclosures.
“Indoors AirFinder works like GPS. We deploy a constellation of fixed “location beacons” that tags measure their distance to, and from those measurements a tag determines and reports its location,” Proctor said. “Outdoors, tags utilize more common outdoor location technologies such as GPS and WiFi sniffing, albeit in a more power efficient manner, which makes the tags last much longer and lowers the lifetime cost of ownership.”
Proctor said that the travel industry is one of Link Labs’ fastest growing market segments because of the demand for tracking high value assets both indoors and outdoors, the need to replace 3G tracking devices and “the simple fact that we have product availability at a time when many asset tracking companies do not.”
Other Location News:
News tip? Send them to kdennehy@driverlessreport.com. Go to www.locationbusinessnews.com for more news and an archive of stories.
🧨 Ukraine Crisis: Google Maps Live Traffic Data Turned off in Country. “Google confirmed the move to the BBC, having told Reuters it took the action for the safety of local communities, after consulting regional authorities. Although traffic data has been disabled, normal maps navigation features are still functioning properly in the area.”
🧨 Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Smartphones Are at the Forefront of Modern War. “Nobody set out to make Google Maps be a military tool, but if it and other big tech services have become that, they have done so without any kind of oversight. Democracy needs information, but governments want to control it, so you can bet that Google and Apple going to be getting some phone calls about it.”
🛩 Alphabet’s Wing Drones Hit 200,000 Deliveries as It Announces Supermarket Partnership. “Australia, which has been the primary market for testing and commercial deployment, comprises 30,000 of those deliveries in the first two months of this year.”
🚗 UC Berkeley Robot Navigation Could Chart a New Course for Self-driving Systems. “RECON was trained by having the wheeled robot, a Jackal unmanned ground vehicle made by Clearpath Robotics, travel on ‘random walks’ through multiple environments such as parking lots and fields over the course of 18 months, collecting hours of video via mounted RGB cameras, LiDAR and GPS.”
👍 Instacart also uses the Mapbox Directions API. “Instacart uses Mapbox to find the optimal delivery routes for shoppers and decide which order will be shipped together.”
✔ Velodyne Lidar Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Financial Results.
✔ Sierra Wireless Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Results.
Advertisement
Have you ever been reluctant to reveal your personal email address online or in person?
The answer is almost universally YES! So, if you happen to be one of those who thinks twice about these matters, ManyMe might be the answer to your worries.
Advertisement
Location Business News has gone from zero to nearly 24,000 subscribers in a little more than 12 months. If you would like to gain more exposure for your products, services, or webinars/events, contact us at info@driverlessreport.com. We also have nearly 41,000 LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media followers. Our recent email open rates have been some of the industry’s best at 55-80 percent.
Location Industry Briefs
Send your news releases to kdennehy@driverlessreport.com. Go to www.locationbusinessnews.com for more news and an archive of stories.
PreAct Technologies Rolls Out Flash Lidar
Portland, Ore.-based PreAct Technologies has announced the industry’s first software-definable flash Lidar called T30P, which will be available in July. The Lidar can be integrated with an autonomous driving system stack for automakers, as well as trucking and robotics applications. “We’ve spent the last three years creating a solution that fulfills the need of software-defined vehicles, providing the most value for Tier 1s and OEMs over the long term by making any ADAS application relevant for the entire life of the vehicle,” said Paul Drysch, PreAct Technologies’ CEO.
With this product, PreAct has been selected by more than one OEM for a production program and is working in both the automotive and heavy truck markets. The company recently received $13 million in funding from State Farm Ventures.
Contact: Paul Drysch, PreAct Technologies, sales@preact-tech.com, www.preact-tech.com.
OCTO Telematics and Ford Extend Partnership
OCTO Telematics has extended its partnership with Ford [F] to provide data streaming into Europe. This extends an initial agreement signed in the North American market in July last year, the company said. The deal leverages Ford’s connected vehicle data to allow OCTO to enhance its insurance telematics services in the UK, Italy, Germany, France and Spain. Currently, OCTO powers more than 43 percent of European usage-based insurance telematics.
Contact: Adriana Zambon, OCTO Telematics, 39 339.3995640, press@octotelematics.com, www.octotelematics.com.
OnTerra Rolls Out RouteSavvy Mobile App
OnTerra Systems has announced the RouteSavvy Mobile App with new delivery, service call management functionality and enhanced smartphone-based GPS tracking. RouteSavvy is web-based, subscription-based, software-as-a-service (SAAS) route planning software for small to mid-sized businesses and non-profits, the company says.
Contact: Courtney DeWinter, for OnTerra Systems, (303) 572.8180, www.RouteSavvy.com.
Zonar Partners With SRM Tech
Zonar has partnered with SRM Tech to add AI and predictive analytics capabilities to light-duty fleets' telematics, enabling data analytics for improved vehicle uptime and increased aftermarket part sales, the companies said. The partnership leverages data from the Zonar LD light-duty telematics control unit (TCU).
Contact: Ben Hohmann, Zonar, (206) 455-9072, ben.hohmann@zonarsystems.com.
EMapgo in Ford Vehicles
Luokung Technology [LKCO] has announced that its operating affiliate eMapgo Technology is now providing mapping services for two new Ford vehicle models—the Ford EVOS and Mustang Mach-E. Both vehicles are equipped with Ford's BlueCruise active drive assist system. EMG's mapping services for the Ford BlueCruise system cover the majority of highways and city expressways in mainland China with over-the-air technology,, the company said.
Contact: Jay Yu, Luokung, 86-10-6506-5217, ir@luokung.com, www.luokung.com.
Maptelligent Announces New Strategic Focus
Maptelligent [MAPT] has announced a new strategic focus to provide remote capture technology (Lidar, Photogrammetry), building information, modeling and location intelligence delivers for customized digital twin and Industry 4.0 applications. Maptelligent a secure web application on Esri’s ArcGIS Platform technology.
Contact: Maptelligent, info@maptelligent.com, www.maptelligent.com.
People
Arbe Robotics [ARBE] has named industry veteran Thilo Koslowski to its Board of Directors. He previously served as the founder and CEO of Porsche Digital GmbH. Koslowski founded and served as vice president of the automotive/smart mobility practice at Gartner Inc.
Taoglas has appointed Karen Armstrong as Vice President of Sales for Custom IoT in North America. Prior to joining Taoglas, Armstrong was the Executive Director of Sales North America for Advantech Ltd.
Clarience Technologies has named David Jacobs as Executive Vice President, Corporate Development. Jacobs most recently served as Vice President of Mergers and Acquisitions at TopBuild Corp. Clarience operates the Road Ready and Fleetilla telematics brands.
Jobs
Senior Product Marketing Specialist. Taoglas.
Director of Marketing. Polte.
Sales Director. Webfleet.
Current Job Openings. Swift Navigation.
Senior Partnership Manager. NavVis
Automotive Data & SaaS Sales Specialist. SBD Automotive.
Get your company’s products and services in the 2022 Location Industry Yearbook!