Hundreds of startups and traditional brick and mortar establishments are adapting to the new way of customers buying things by leveraging smartphone apps to facilitate one or more aspects of customer purchase journey: discovery, couponing, merchandising, delivery, payments and loyalty. Stores, restaurants, hotels, pharmacies, hospitals, airlines, handymen are all getting disrupted by this new economy of connected commerce (also widely known as the hyper-local or online to offline phenomenon). Accurately locating customers in their purchase journey to identify context and deliver personalized experiences is key.
Clean Slate Technologies’ hardware-free SDK platform brings effective & scalable indoor location context to mobile apps to bring digital style insights into the physical world for brick and mortar industries.
4 engineers from Mumbai,
Aman Bapna (ex PwC, IIT K),
Anubhaw Kumar (ex TCS, SRM C),
Mayank Sharma (ex PwC, IIT B) and
Siddharth Desai (ex JSW, IIT B) with a passion to connect the real and digital worlds started Clean Slate Technologies in Jan, 2016 to be a driver of this connected commerce disruption and solve the indoor location puzzle.
Within the team lies extensive experience in software engineering, geo-information satellite imagery and advanced data modelling. Having experienced the accuracy and scale issues of legacy location technologies like GPS, RFID, NFC, Wifi and BLE Beacons first hand, they decided to wipe the slate clean and develop a new technology which traces its roots to 206 BC and is based on nature’s oldest location apparatus: geo-magnetic fields.
Using advanced machine learning algorithms, Clean Slate’s proprietary technology records variation in earth’s geo-magnetic fields in indoor venues and identifies people’s location by matching these patterns based on data fusion of MEMS sensors from smartphones. The products is a cloud based SDK platform inLocate, which can be integrated into any mobile app.
Once integrated, the inLocate SDK detects the presence and behavior of people in initialized indoor venues to bring indoor location context which developers can further use it to trigger pre-programmed actions like prompting a notification, personalizing user experience, analytics for business intelligence etc through their apps. The platform can be used by brick and mortar establishments and O2O players across retail, F&B, hospitality, travel and healthcare industries for multiple use cases like proximity marketing, in-store or in-venue engagement, offline attribution and behavioural analytics.
There are more than 400 players in this space across the world. Most of them are BLE or Wifi based solutions which require expensive hardware installation and maintenance, need users to switch on GPS or Bluetooth or Wifi which drain battery and are prone to hardware device hacking.
Enterprises or developers with thousands of commercial indoor venues will need to spend millions of dollars to ‘beaconize’ their venues for a very small audience making the existing solutions unviable. Clean Slate’s inLocate doesn’t require hardware installation or maintenance and instead has a simple one time fingerprint based initialization process, doesn’t require user to switch on GPS or Bluetooth or Wifi and is entirely cloud based and thus secure. This makes inLocate one of the most effective and scalable indoor location platforms in the world.
inLocate has a SaaS based monetization model. The team has bootstrapped their way through Research and Development. They were positively surprised on the enthusiastic encouragement they got from leaders at IBM Deeptech SmartCamp despite being the youngest team. The team has finished product development and testing of inLocate across Mumbai, NCR and Bangalore, and are rolling out a closed beta. In order to solve real business problems, they are inviting brick and mortar establishments and O2O players across retail, F&B, hospitality, travel and healthcare industries to collaborate with Clean Slate by integrating inLocate into their mobile apps and co-build scalable solutions.
Over the next 6 months, Clean Slate will work with over 10 anchor customers across 5 industries to build effective solutions for their respective domains to reach over 10 million smartphone users. Most of the challenges they’ve faced are around building this unique technology and platform from the ground up with very little research available and lack of a strong technology eco-system.
The total indoor location market is projected to disrupt multiple industries to a grow to USD 24b market size by 2021.
BW Reporters
Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
