{"id":658715,"date":"2013-05-17T11:55:43","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T15:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=646551"},"modified":"2013-05-17T11:55:43","modified_gmt":"2013-05-17T15:55:43","slug":"aruba-buys-indoor-location-startup-meridian-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/658715","title":{"rendered":"Aruba buys indoor-location startup Meridian. Here\u2019s why"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aruba Networks is already building a good deal of the world\u2019s enterprise Wi-Fi networks, pumping wireless signals to malls, conference centers and hotels around the globe. Now it has another use for those networks beyond mere connectivity: it can pinpoint a smartphone\u2019s location within those locations\u2019 maze-like corridors.<\/p>\n

Aruba has acquired Meridian Apps<\/a>, a Portland, Ore.,-based startup that uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can\u2019t penetrate. (The terms of the deal weren\u2019t disclosed.) Meridian is one of many companies using Wi-Fi signals to gain its bearings, but Meridian, like its competitor Wifarer, also builds apps for businesses that want location-awareness to be key part of their mobile offering.<\/p>\n

Meridian has designed museum guide apps for the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History. It\u2019s built department locator apps for Macy\u2019s and incorporated casino floor plans into the Bellagio\u2019s mobile app.<\/p>\n

\"Meridian<\/a><\/p>\n

While this kind of kind of technology can be used to bring the usual bevy of location-based services to building interiors, it has the potential of making those services much more granular. For instance, many of the museum apps developed by Meridian and Wifarer are able to determine not just what room you\u2019re in, but what exhibit you\u2019re actually looking at<\/a> — the app can immediate populate your smartphone screen with details about the wooly mammoth or Van Gogh painting you\u2019re admiring. This kind of hyper-local content\u00a0is attracting the interest of the big mobile services players<\/a>, including Apple and Google.<\/p>\n

Aruba\u2019s particular interest in Meridian probably has something to do with the fact that its technology is largely infrastructure-dependent. As Meridian CTO Nick Farina explained in his blog<\/a>, even though smartphones have the ability to sniff out their own locations by measuring Wi-Fi signals, Meridian\u2019s technology relies on access points to make those measurements, thus sparing the phone\u2019s battery and allowing it to work on more restricted devices like the iPhone.<\/p>\n

Aruba is the No. 2 enterprise WLAN supplier in the world, supplying networks for every manner of hospital, corporate campus, convention center or mall. You can imagine that many of those customers would be very interested in buying not just a network from Aruba, but also a means to use that network to provide location-aware content and services to their employees and customers.<\/p>\n

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