3 Israeli startups vying to be the Waze of indoor spaces

Abigail Klein Leichman

Oriient, Navin and Indoorgo want to help you navigate malls, museums, hospitals and airports without any need for installed hardware in the venue.

Image via Shutterstock.com

The Israeli navigation app Waze will steer you to your destination along the fastest route. But it can’t help you find your way inside a mall, museum, school, hospital, airport or other large building because GPS doesn’t work indoors.

This problem has caught the attention of tech companies large and small, including Google and Apple, yet today’s indoor maps haven’t mastered live navigation functionality.

Three Israeli companies are meeting this challenge with sophisticated indoor orientation apps independent of beacons or any other hardware installations in the venue. Each approach is slightly different, as we explain below.

Oriient

Oriient, founded in February 2016 in Tel Aviv, is building a plug-in for app developers on a monthly licensing model. The technology pinpoints indoor position within three feet using information from the Earth’s magnetic field and from sensors inside every smartphone.

Many malls, for example, already offer visitors free dedicated apps that enable them to do a store or product search. Adding Oriient to that app will provide an accurate indoor positioning service to guide the shopper directly to the store and even the shelf. The same could be done in any large building.

“Retailers and facility managers expect the service to just work without installing or maintaining anything. It’s low-cost and no hassle, and that’s what drives us,” CEO Mickey Balter tells ISRAEL21c.

Oriient was incubated in the 8200 EISP accelerator in Tel Aviv from January to June last year, and then from June to September in Techstars/Metro Accelerator for Retail in Berlin, a new cooperation between a German retail chain and an American accelerator.

“Through that platform we gained significant customers in the European retail space and are working with them on deployment,” says Balter.

“Next would be extension to the US and to non-retail verticals like smart buildings and robotics. We are seeing a lot of opportunities in the ‘future of the workspace’ as a lot of office buildings are introducing indoor positioning. We don’t necessarily have to track smartphones; we can also track robots.”

Oriient has five employees and is hiring more, having received more than $2 million in seed funding.

Navin

Navin took off nearly five years ago, guided by cofounders including Shai Ronen, a former F-16 combat navigator and Technion computer science graduate who worked in mapping and navigation technology at Elbit, Visionmap and Compugen.

Like Waze, the Navin app is powered by crowdsourcing. Its patented P2P Crowd Mapping technology turns smartphones into anonymous indoor mapping devices that passively capture millions of data movement points using aviation-grade stabilization, noise-canceling and drift-correction algorithms. The app generates maps from these data points.

Shai Ronen of Navin. Photo: courtesy

“We have the novel ability to create detailed maps of any building anywhere in the world remotely on our servers, without us ever being in that building,” Ronen tells ISRAEL21c.

Because a critical mass of data is needed to create each map — about 20 to 40 users using virtually any device at any time — Navin will recruit regional “ambassadors” to do the mapping prior to a beta launch early this year in one city at a time. Currently, Navin is being tested in large Israeli hospitals.

Navin was incubated in 8200 EISP and then in the Microsoft Ventures accelerator. Three years ago, serial entrepreneur Gidi Barak came aboard as founder and active chairman.

The Tel Aviv startup has 12 employees and has raised nearly $2 million from investors and the Israel Innovation Authority. Recently, Navin opened an office in Hong Kong because “Asia is a great place to start and there is a lot of interest in Hong Kong and Singapore, which are gateways to other countries,” says Ronen.

The revenue model probably will be based on in-app advertising from businesses in the buildings mapped, targeted to individual users’ movement patterns.

Indoorgo

Indoorgo Navigation Systems is developing an app that makes use of smartphone sensors and existing infrastructure in a building, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as the fixed position of the building’s overhead lights.

“This also allows us uniquely to give navigation in places such as parking garages,” says Larry Loev, CEO of Ariel Scientific Innovations, the technology commercialization arm of Ariel University.

The core technology was developed nearly five years ago in the university’s Kinematics and Computational Geometry Laboratory by professors Boaz Ben-Moshe and Nir Shvalb. Ben-Moshe and Ariel Scientific Innovations are the primary shareholders of Indoorgo, which has been exclusively funded till now by Ariel University.

To add any building to the app’s central database, it must be mapped once by one person – it could be an employee of the building, with no special training – in the course of about two hours. Data from subsequent Indoorgo users improves the positioning accuracy, explains Ben-Moshe. “Accuracy of up to 3 meters is achieved for the first visitor, gradually improving to less than 1 meter.”

Loev says this resolution is significant. “Google Maps can throw you off by 10 to 15 meters, while ours will be a product you can reliably use.”

Indoorgo is in the demo stage and has been tested in Israeli shopping malls. “The company is now ready for investment or sale,” says Loev.

Targeted in-app advertising is the most likely revenue model.

NO LEGISLATION CAN REWRITE HISTORY

DANIEL SCHATZ

“One cannot fake history, one cannot rewrite it, one cannot hide the truth.”

Newly appointed Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki reacts after receiving his nomination from President Andrzej Duda during a government swearing-in ceremony in Warsaw, Poland, December 11, 2017. (photo credit: AGENCJA GAZETA/SLAWOMIR KAMINSKI VIA REUTERS)

My childhood was full of magical, well-known tales of love and joy and everyday life in the shtetls of Poland, told with warmth and wit by my grandparents. Some of these characters became my childhood heroes.

As a little boy yet unaware of Auschwitz, I wondered about my grandmother’s sadness: even when telling funny stories, she seemed to laugh with one eye and cry with the other. I don’t remember when I found out that all the characters, so alive in these vivid stories, were murdered in the Holocaust.

In recent years I have had several opportunities to visit former Polish shtetls, including the town of Zamosc, where my grandmother’s family lived before the Second World War. These villages are places where memory has been turned into history.

On a one-lane street leading to a small house on Ulica Gesia in Zamosc, I found the house where the Zalcman family once lived. It was from here that my relatives were sent to the death camp of Belzec in July 1942.

My grandmother saved herself by fleeing to the Soviet Union with her parents. While taking refuge in the towns and villages of the Polish countryside throughout the daring escape, they lived in constant fear of being denounced by their Polish neighbors.

On another street in Katowice, I found the house where my grandparents found refuge after miraculously surviving the war. From here, they were expelled in 1968 following the Polish communist government’s antisemitic campaign resulting in the forced exodus of nearly all of the country’s remaining 20,000 Jews, a mere 25 years after Nazi Germany had carried out the Holocaust on Polish soil.

Although World War II ended in 1945, the past is never dead. It’s not even past, as the author William Faulkner put it. Last week Poland’s President Andrzej Duda signed into law a bill approved by the country’s senate, imposing prison terms of up to three years for anyone who acknowledges Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

In addition to the risk of infringing upon freedom of speech and academic scholarship, the legislation – spearheaded by Warsaw’s ruling right-wing populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) – may distort historical records about the complicity of segments of the country’s population in the persecution of their compatriots.

The narrative of Poles as the main victims of Nazi Germany is deeply rooted in Polish national memory. Six million of its citizens were murdered by the Germans. Of the six million Jewish Holocaust victims, half were Polish Jews, accounting for 90% of the Jewish population in the country. Poles constitute the largest national group within the Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

The idea of Polish national innocence is nonetheless – as pointed out by the American historian Timothy Snyder – far from innocent itself. A growing number of scholars – as the Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski – have argued that Poles took simultaneous roles as victims, perpetrators and bystanders. He documents their involvement in betraying and murdering their compatriots in The Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013), while highlighting the heroism of individual Poles who risked their lives in efforts to save Jews.

The publication of Neighbors (2001) by the Polish-American historian Jan Tomasz Gross had already spurred Polish society into collective soul-searching and official state apologies. Gross details how, on July 10, 1941, under the eyes of the German occupiers, Polish Catholics murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors by burning them alive in the town of Jedwabne. Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance revealed, following a two-year investigation, that mass murders initiated by locals had taken place in several other villages.

Illustrative of the prevailing political sentiments in Warsaw, Poland’s Education Minister Anna Zalewska insinuated during an interview on the public broadcaster TVN in 2016 that the Jedwabne massacre was a matter of opinion. The same year, Gross was summoned to appear before Polish police for stating that Poles killed more Jews than they did Germans during the Holocaust. Gross was suspected of insulting the honor of the Polish nation.

Rather than seeking to use history to serve the imperatives of the present, those who see themselves as defenders of Poland’s good name should draw inspiration from its former president Aleksander Kwasniewski, who stressed to the Knesset in 2000 that “one cannot fake history, one cannot rewrite it, one cannot hide the truth.”

No government can rewrite historical facts and no law can erase history. Each society ought to examine historical developments and offenses, irrespective of the nationality of the perpetrators, to eradicate the ghosts of the past and safeguard a future founded upon respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. This remains our obligation to the dead and the living.

Daniel Schatz  – The author is a political scientist and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s European Institute. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, Stanford and Georgetown University.