Edinburgh senses free development kit

Sensewhere, an indoor positioning spin-out of Edinburgh University, has made its software development kit available license free to both mobile device manufacturers and to platform providers.

Concurrently, it has announced it will give its partners a revenue cut up to 25%. The revenue share will be from the company’s crowd-sourced regional location databases.

The spin-out’s software development kit will allow developers to create indoor advertising on mobile phones and wearables. The company’s core technology traces a user’s location to within 10 metres indoors by triangulating the position from known wireless hotspots listed in its database.

To date, it has run pilots in Seoul, San Francisco and Rio. It plans to add databases of ten new cities in the near future, in China, Europe and Australasia.

Rob Palfreyman, chief executive at Sensewhere, said: “We believe our cutting-edge technology coupled with a no-risk commercial model will radically change the world of indoor location. While other positioning companies measure themselves by number of venues covered, customers equipping their devices with Sensewhere can benefit from global venue coverage in a very short period of time with zero cost to build the database.  Crucially, our system enables marketers to roll out indoor positioning campaigns at low cost and without the need for any hardware. The potential for indoor positioning and proximity marketing is huge if even a fraction of overall retail sales are attributed to the information the technology gives to retailers, so we are confident that there will be significant interest in our regional, crowd-sourced databases.”