Tag: location based technology

ABI has released a report that says that a new type of sensor fusion that is rare today will be commonplace soon.

ABI Research has now released a report that looks quite promising for companies that have been considering the use of location based marketing, as they have said that geolocation sensor fusion remains “very much a rarity on smartphones today,” but that this will be changing in the near future.

The report said that by 2019 the market for this technology will be tremendous due to usage trends.

It explained that trends toward local search, health, retail, personal asset tracking, and connected home apps will spread geolocation based tech massively by 2019. This will open up a practically limitless number of doors for location based marketing technology providers and users. Patrick Connolly, a senior analyst from ABI Research, explained that “Conditions are perfect for disruptive new entrants.”

ABI Research feels that the technology that will drive location based marketing is about to take off.

Connolly went on to explain that “All major sensor IC vendors have identified location-based sensor fusion as important, yet InvenSense is the only company to actively invest in this area. This lack of priority is driven by a short-term demand issue, as the indoor ecosystem is not evolved enough to warrant major developer interest.” The result, he said, will be that there will be a “void”, as that application starts to explode over the next couple of years.

GNSS IC vendors and startups will, says ABI Research, be able to take advantage of a considerable chance for meeting this demand. That said, it should be pointed out that unlike the market for IC, where there is a single position for which everybody must compete, it is the belief of ABI Research that smartphones will run a number of different indoor geolocation technologies for various apps and purposes.

Connolly explained that this environment is unique in its potential for competition, which is made even more complex by vendors such as Apple, that like to develop their own geolocation sensor fusion solutions as a component of an “always-on ubiquitous offering”. As a result of the disruption that this will cause, competition will develop and it will form a chance for equal measures.

Location based marketing companies will be provided with an array of choices with which they will then be able to engage consumers.

When a credit card transaction is denied outside of its owner’s home country, up to 80 percent are false positives.

Mastercard is now using geolocation technology in order to help to reduce the frequency of “false positives” that are occurring when one of their customers has attempted to use his or her card in a legitimate way, but has had the transaction denied as it registers as potentially fraudulent.

This is an opt-in service that allows a customer to be matched with his or her location to validate a transaction.

This service uses the geolocation technology in a customer’s smartphone so that when they leave their home country and attempt to use their credit card, their location can be confirmed as being the same as that of the transaction, so that the purchase will not be flagged as a potentially risky one and a false positive can be avoided. For this program, MasterCard is working with Syniverse, an IPX provider, which has access to over six billion individual mobile subscribers who are located in over two hundred different countries.

The goal of this use of geolocation technology is to use mobile security methods to boost transaction authentication.

According to the CMO of Syniverse, Mary Patterson Clark, “We’re providing an additional layer of fraud protection for when a consumer is on the road.” She added that “Over and above the existing fraud protection, [MasterCard is] offering this additional opt-in fraud protection offer to their customers.”

What Clark described was a system in which the MasterCard certificate generates a token and then sends it to the platform that has been enabled by that credit card giant and Syniverse. With this, Syniverse is able to compare the location of the MasterCard and the location of the user at his or her last registration update. If those two positions are nearby, then the transaction will not be flagged as potentially fraudulent.

The company is not only hoping to continue with the reduction in false positive identifications of fraud that it has already been achieving through this geolocation technology, but it will also use it to help to make it easier for travelers to purchase prepaid data packages while they are away from home.