“During trade shows you will have thousands of exhibitors in individual booths. For a visitor to walk around and quickly and easily find the ones that interest them is not that easy.”

Insiteo’s pseudo‘navigation satellites’

Insiteo’s solution provides a seamless continuation of location services to indoors, where GPS is unavailable.

“We install a synchronised network of low-cost transmitters simulating indoor GPS and Galileo navigation signals with a high level of accuracy,” adds Arnaud Masson.

“The users download and install our Insiteo mobile application on their phones, which allows the display of the precise location on an indoor map, to search for any point-of-interest, product or event, to display and follow an itinerary and to receive multimedia content. Our application runs on iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian systems.”

Mobile phone navigation

Insiteo was supported by ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme Office at its Business Incubation Centre Noordwijk in the Netherlands, where the company developed its patented solution.

There, Insiteo obtained support from ESTEC engineers and access to ESTEC’s sophisticated laboratory equipment to calibrate their system and carry out detailed measurements for their customers.

Insiteo system shows the way on floor plan

“Accurate, ubiquitous localisation remains one of the key inhibitors to future location-based services growth,” says Patrick Connolly, Research Director at IMS Research from the UK.

“For certain applications, GPS alone doesn’t offer sufficient coverage or availability and WiFi and Cell-ID do not offer consistent accuracy.

“Insiteo promises to address this problem head on and does so using technologies already widely available in mobile phones today.”

The company concluded the first phase of a funding round of several million euros in September 2009, securing investments from Emertec and a small group of business angels. This allowed Insiteo to equip its first clients, including Expo Porte de Versailles.

“We were impressed by the depth of the market for indoor localisation where Insiteo has a unique value proposition. Its founders are experienced managers with a strong international culture. Our investment, even at this early stage, has attracted the unanimous enthusiasm of the team,” said Bernard Maître, President of Emertec.

Insiteo is based in Toulouse and at ESA BIC Noordwijk in the Netherlands, with offices in Paris, Amsterdam and soon in Silicon Valley, USA. The company was awarded ESA’s Special Prize for its submission to the Galileo Masters Competition in 2008.

ESA Business Incubation Centres

ESA’s business incubation is one of the major initiatives of the Agency’s Technology Transfer Programme Office (TTPO). As part of its endeavour to encourage the transfer and commercialisation of space technologies, four Business Incubation Centres (BICs) have been set up in the Netherlands, Darmstadt and Oberpfaffenhofen in Germany, and near Rome in Italy. The centres support selected entrepreneurs with comprehensive commercial and technical assistance to help them start up businesses that use space technology in non-space industrial, scientific and commercial fields.

ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme Office

The main mission of the TTPO is to facilitate the use of space technology and space systems for non-space applications and to demonstrate the benefit of the European space programme to European citizens. The office is responsible for defining the overall approach and strategy for the transfer of space technologies, including the incubation of start-up companies and their funding. For more information, please contact:

ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme Office
European Space Agency
Keplerlaan 1
2200 AG, Noordwijk ZH
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 71 565 6208
Email: ttp@esa.int