Qubulus Receives Investment, Focuses Indoor Positioning On Events

Last friday Qubulus, the mobile indoor positioning out of Sweden, announced it has completed a funding round led by angel investor Jean Pierre Payat followed by the Swedish government backed investment fund, Innovationsbron. The existing shareholders have also joined the round, including IT consultancy company Jayway, retail re-development company Reteam, as well as Qubulus’ management. The size of the investment was undisclosed.

Aside from the funding news, today Qubulus is announcing a new partnership with Crunchfish to add accurate Indoor Positioning support their Hearway app. Together their app basically provides your car’s spoken GPS, but for your smartphone.

Indoor navigational information is not only presented visually with dots on a map in the phone. Instead, as with the Hearway system, it is simultaneously sent as pre-recorded audio straight to a visitor’s headphones. This means that the visitors are given audio directions to their desired locations, much in the same way as a GPS in a car gives, but at the same time these directions are interspersed with messages related locations that the visitors pass by.

The companies are showcasing this technology at Mobile World Congress next week. Qubulus says the huge halls in which the exhibitions take place are the perfect environments to demonstrate the solution in action. When the application is active, it allows visitors to ‘hear’ their way through the multitude of exhibitors at MWC, saving both time and energy, and at the same time getting important information sent to them that makes sure they don’t miss anything they might have been interested in. It sounds like really cool technology, but you have to admit it’s a strange new future where a quick detour to the restroom could make you hear the GPS lady say “recalculating route…”

CEO Frank Schuil tells us that other than this partnership, “Analytics is a major focus for us,” and they’re focusing Qubulus on analytics data that can show much more detailed mobility patterns than the current visitor counting systems.