 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here. We're on the ground at the JW Marriott in San Francisco, California at Location and Context World 2014. It's like a whole other world in terms of what this mobility is enabling. We talk about mobile apps all the time and everybody's deploying mobile apps. But really now we're doing this kind of, it's almost like GPS for inside. This location and context world outside of your car, inside buildings, stores, hospitals, you name it. And it's pretty interesting this whole ecosystem that's building out to support these applications on the phone. So we're joined here by our next guest, Dirk Callarts, the CEO of BlueLock. Welcome. Yes, I'm happy to be here. So it's really interesting. It's like GPS for inside is really one of the main themes here that people are talking about. Where are you in the location? Well, BlueLock has a solution for doing very accurate indoor positioning and that's important because if you wanna have GPS inside, which is navigation, you need an accurate position. And here there's two differences to be made. Positioning is your real actual location, position, but you also have proximity. And what we see now in a lot of applications is people use proximity, you're close to this area and then you get messages to your phone. That's a different application than I'm now here and I have to be there. How do I go there? Then you need a real accurate position. And is the location is a three dimensional? Is it up and down as well? You know I'm in the fifth floor instead of the second floor? Yes, it is, it's supporting multiple levels inside buildings. It is able to track not only smartphones, but also tags. We have our own tags, which you can put in a wristband or wear as a badge. And this is important because if you wanna track kids indoor, they don't have smartphones. If you have the very... You haven't had kids in a while. No, no, no, not the small one. I don't know, I've seen some funny pictures. But anyway, so you can put a tag on or whatever you wanna put the tag on. Even on very, very, let's say, expensive assets in a hospital, like a heart monitor, you can put a tag on there and then you know exactly in which room the monitor is. So let's talk a bit about the proximity. And when GPS first came out, it was always talked about how accurate, how accurate, where does the Defense Department draw the line? And I asked a couple guys at some of the other booths here, how accurate can you be in terms of the proximity? And they really didn't have a good answer. So how accurate can you be to know exactly where someone is? Well, for indoor applications, I think they have put the level up to one meter, which is three feet. If you are accurate within that area, then it's accurate enough. It doesn't, it's not important if you're exactly here or let's say two feet to the side, that's not needed. But like GPS is also, it's accurate in one way, but on the other way, it gets its accuracy by linking the position information to a roadmap, because there are roads, if the GPS knows you're moving that direction, it can position you along a road. Even if it's not accurate enough to put you on the road. Because it's assuming that it's there where you're moving. And that's really the power of using both the location as well as the context. And that's why we are using the floor plan, which is the context. We use the floor plan of the venue in order to show you like where you are, but also to really calculate positions that are possible. You cannot walk through walls, but you know where you are then. Right, so talk a bit about the ecosystem, because there's all these different parts, it seems that are coming together. You've got the sensors, you've got your application in terms of the location sensitivity, you've got all this messaging stuff going on. I presume that there's gonna be integrations to more complicated marketing types of applications or complicated analytic packages. But it sounds like there's this whole infrastructure that's kind of coming together to enable these applications and these capabilities. Yes, well in the ecosystem, there are different things to be discussed. One is the technologies. First technology that was used, RF technology was Wi-Fi. Because Wi-Fi, there's a lot of access points deployed already and first solution started using Wi-Fi. Now with that technology, you can get an accuracy up to five, six meters, or you need fingerprinting, which is very elaborative to have it more accurate. Then there is Bluetooth low energy now coming up, also in all the smartphones. And with that, we have proven that we can make an accurate solution. Now for the applications, there's an abundance of applications. Once you know exactly where a person is inside, there are applications for hospitals with older people, for kids for finding them back in theme parks on cruise ships. For retail to really analyze the behavior of a customer in the store, what kind of tracks does the customer follow? Where are the dead zones in the store, et cetera? So it's a store analytics. There are so many applications. You can analyze the behavior of the customer and then send very dedicated advertisements to his phone, like, okay, we know that you like football or soccer. There is a promotion for buying this and this and this kind of wearings. Go and get it. So what was kind of the breakthrough technology? Was it just the power of the phones that we have? Because you know, you're talking about RFID. I mean, you're talking about a lot of old technologies that have been tuned, but are really kind of being pulled together around a new type of application in Workspace. That is mobile phones, I guess. To me, the breakthrough is to look into low power. Because of the new standard of Bluetooth is getting into low power, it means that the smartphone will have a longer autonomy. So low power also for the tags is important. With Wi-Fi, you cannot do that. With Bluetooth, low energy, you can do it. So by having this low power applications, it enables, again, a new type of solution. Awesome. Well, that's just great insight in, you know, the power is so key to those phones, right? Because the batteries die. Everyone makes jokes about them in the airport, all stuck on the wall, right? So having that low power is really critical. Well, Dirk, thanks for stopping by. And just one thing I want to add to that. Well, if you put those beacons, indeed, the batteries need to be replaced. We have built beacons with a solar panel. So once you put them up under light, it recharges itself. So it does energy harvesting. You don't need to replace the batteries anymore. And how many, what's proximity are the sensors? How many do you have to have? How close do you have to be? We typically say you need one beacon per 30 square meters. I'm European, so I'm counting in meters. It's actually pretty big. 30 square meters is pretty big. So one per to 30 is to have this accuracy is efficient. Awesome. Well, Dirk, thanks for stopping by. Appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Sorry, step on your shoe. Jeff Rick here. We're on the ground at Location and Context World, San Francisco, California at the JW Marriott. You're watching theCUBE.