Location intelligence has been put to use in mission-critical industries, such as public safety, for years. The large volumes of location data produced by a variety of sources, most prominently our mobile devices, has become an important ingredient for businesses across a wide range of industries, such as retail, healthcare, and hospitality. When this location data is obtainable at no cost, its quality and accuracy is often unreliable or inaccurate. In addition, this ‘free’ data does not provide floor-level, z-axis information, further decreasing its utility.
Savvy businesses interested in using location data to run more efficiently, grow revenue, create a better customer experience, and track high-value assets understand the drawbacks of ‘free’ location data and instead are seeking out high-accuracy, quality sources for important applications. They understand that with higher quality comes a commensurate cost, justified by the return on investment from producing higher customer satisfaction or delivering more successful campaigns. Demand for high-accuracy location data presents the opportunity for companies to deliver Location as a Service (LaaS) in a consistent, accurate way. Polaris Wireless, with our decades of experience in providing high-accuracy location across three dimensions, sees LaaS as the next chapter in the evolution of our business. We are utilizing our 3D Location Platform to provide a higher level of accuracy, reliability and confidence in all environments – indoors, outdoors and vertical. This, in turn, enables business to make better decisions such as offering more relevant mobile ads, designing a more efficient route for package deliveries, or targeting rideshare meetup points in a multi-story location, such as an airport.
Take, for example, location-based advertising. For years companies have utilized mobile phone location to target potential customers with personalized ads and offers, such as coupons for free coffee when someone is in proximity of a Starbucks. LaaS takes this a step further, storing and analyzing the thousands of location movements that occur every day, to produce a sophisticated model of what advertisements potential customers are most likely to respond to. The possibilities are endless once the power of LaaS is fully-leveraged alongside a robust marketing effort. Of course, safeguards must be in place to protect data privacy and ensure that consumers opt in to sharing their location in exchange for the benefits they will receive. Going forward, I will be sharing more examples for LaaS across different vertical industries in this blog and welcome your feedback and questions.
