The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Apple has acquired WiFiSlam, an indoor GPS startup that enables smartphones to pinpoint its location — along with that of your friends — in realtime up to 2.5 meters in accuracy.
Apple paid $20 million to acquire WiFiSlam, although the specific terms of the deal have not been shared as of yet. However, Apple has confirmed the acquisition, telling Macrumors:
The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. It has been offering the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps. The company has a handful of employees, and its co-founders include former Google software engineering intern Joseph Huang.
WiFiSlam seems to be part of Apple’s continued plan to build up its location capabilities, and is likely a sign that indoor GPS is just starting to get hot. For its part, WiFiSlam wants to “engage with users at the scale that personal interaction actually takes place” and foresees its future use cases as “step-by-step indoor navigation to product-level retail customer engagement, to proximity-based social networking.”
A graduate of StartX, Stanford’s student accelerator, WiFiSlam has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from investors like AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, Google’s Don Dodge and Start Fund’s Felix Shipman — to name a few.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/C4pF_sbMrS0/
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