Competitive Review

1. Wayfinder

RLSB(Royal London Society for the Blind’s) Youth Forum launch this idea/app particularly for people living in London. They planned to improve the life of blind people by helping in daily life movement like public transport, to see friends, go to school, college or office.

Wayfinder working as a non-profit organization, the Wayfinder community have collaboration with different organizations those from different backgrounds and Wayfinder categorise those in Friends of Wayfindr and the Alliance members.

Objectives?

• Empowering vision impaired people to navigate the world independently
• Technology based solution to facilitate blind people in public transport to make independent travelling in London transport system
• iBeacon equipped transport terminals communicated with mobile app to facilitate blind users in finding directions and different terminals point

Strengths?

• Design of audio Instructions, they added voice message to convey message/warnings
• Interaction Design and also adding UI features full sighted, and this will facilitate when they will interact with a digital navigation service
• Affiliations with research institutions
• In December 2015 Google.org supported Wayfindr through the Global Impact Challenge: Disabilities and received a $1m grant
• Strong collaboration with well reputed local companies and specialisms

Weaknesses?

• Only targeting specific group of people and area
• No Future plan to implement in other countries or areas
• No business plan, working as a non-profit organization

Marketing strategies?

• Social media
• Conferences
• Blog
• Interviews
• Nonprofit organization
• Public relations

Useful sources

• http://www.wayfindr.net/

2. BlindSquare

BlindSquare is an ios application that assists visually impaired navigate around indoor and outdoor spaces, and keep track of their belongings in public as it helps in sensing what’s around them by simply touching and listening.

Objectives

• positioning beacons in public places in and around a metropolis which activates voice directions to assist navigation (helpful in unfamiliar areas).
• A temporary location finding – this employs the use of configured beacons, placed in certain items (or temporary location) which assists the user to locate his/her belonging. BlindSquare app will then help detect and find the beacon.

Strengths

• The app has some algorithms to decide which detects the most relevant information and then speaks it with well distinct voice clarity.
• It uses GPS and the compass to locate the user. It then gathers information about the surrounding environment from FourSquare.
• It can detect when the user is traveling by car, bus or train and then it begins to report interesting places around.
• Another nice added feature is that the user can save some private places to iCloud so which will be found with your every device.
• Interestingly also BlindSquare supports 24 languages.

Weaknesses

• Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.

Marketing Strategy

• Partnering with Kontakt.io iBeacon providers (Outsourcing)
• The app comes at a cost
• Blog – user reviews

Useful sources

• http://kontakt.io/beacons-ibeacons-use-cases/
• https://itunes.apple.com/app/blindsquare/id500557255

3. Indoors

Description

Indoor navigation developed for travelers at airports, railway-stations, etc. with mobile assistance. Indoor positioning enabled apps allow onsite retailers to send realtime offers and coupons based on a customer’s location and interest.

Objectives

• Support travelers to find the shortest routes.
• Improve queue management and minimize waiting time.
• Activate travelers with time to kill and money to spend.

Strengths

• Bluetooth Low Energy solution is platform independent, allowing for localization on iOS and Android devices.
• Proximity allows you to run localization in a matter of minutes (without the need to do fingerprint measurements)
• Map is available offline.
• Developers Indoors used unique battery-saving algorithms.(User can choose determine the frequency of position updates)
• 2D, 3D, vector and augmented reality maps can be used for displaying a position.
• Navigation on multiple floors .
• Use app can find  information about frequency, customer traffic patterns, heat maps of customers density, and duration of visits.
• Technology detects when user enter a building or change floors and switches to the according maps.

Weaknesses

• Support Packages is very expensive.

Marketing strategies

• Registration new developer
• Conferences
• Blog
• Public relations

Useful sources

• http://indoo.rs/