The future of shopping: fast and accurate positioning by LED lights and smartphones

Imagine a scenario where: you walk into the mall and you want to pick out a new ipad Mini, a warm winter coat and some daily necessities, so you take out your smartphone, and an app can lead you to the location of the product and maybe even give you some discount coupons. Bytelight is an application that uses LED lights and smartphones to build communications networks that track and guide shoppers, locate items, and provide preferential information.

In the outdoors, smartphones generally rely on GPS positioning, but not in the interior. and ordinary indoor wireless technology, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, etc., is not very suitable for the exact location of personal location (deployment more cumbersome).

Bytelight's idea is to target the shopper's whereabouts with specially designed lighting signals from the store's LED lights to the smartphone camera. There are three prerequisites:

1 user mobile phone must first install bytelight software

2 smart phones must be held in the hands of the user

3 LED lights need to install a chip to be able to emit light signals.

This kind of light signal takes a unique flash mode, its flicker frequency is very fast, the human eye is unable to perceive. Good positioning technology must be fast, accurate, this is bytelight think of the starting point of the use of light. According to his co-founder and CTO Dan Ryan, the technology's accuracy can be within 1 meters and will not be positioned for more than 1 seconds.

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The built-in chip of the LED light and the software that detects the light signal will also create a path for directional advertising, and can also guide shoppers to find what they want. The chip cost is low, and any smartphone camera can sense the signals from its controlled LEDs.

But Bytelight's business model remains to be determined. Bytelight neither provide chips nor sell LED lights built into these chips, but it can charge royalties by providing chip designs to manufacturing companies such as LED. The company has yet to develop its own mobile apps. The idea is to provide tools for developers to develop such applications, which is one of their billing channels.

Now Bytelight has set up a content management system that can help retailers track and put ads or other information on smartphones, ads, information, and other content that can be loaded with a variety of bytelight based smartphone apps. If the retailer lacks technical ability, bytelight can do the same.

To be sure, Bytelight's technology requires a lot of coordination with LED lighting companies and retailer app developers. This positioning technology should be attractive to LED-lamp manufacturers, as it can provide a fresh selling point for these companies. Conversely, this also means that the popularization of bytelight technology depends on the development of the LED market.

Privacy is also a potential problem because the technology can track people's movements to launch targeted ads. Bytelight's argument is that as long as you do not pull out the phone, whereabouts will not be exposed.

Founded in 2011, Bytelight has financed 1.25 million of billions of dollars from VantagePoint capital and the United States and is doing on-site testing with some unnamed companies.

(via 36 Krypton)