Amsterdam, Netherlands – AILO Foundation is pleased to announce that their crowdfunding campaign has launched and is running on Indiegogo. AILO stands for Airport Indoor Location. The nonprofit foundation goal is to install AILO on as many airport terminals as possible, without any costs for them to ensure the fastest adoption and make this amazing technology freely available to air travellers all over the world.
Indoor Location is like a very high precision GPS system that uses several smartphone sensors like wifi, bluetooth, magnetometer, gyroscope (among several others) to provide very detailed location info to be used by any mobile maps app including iOS Maps and Google Maps to provide indoor navigation features like: showing your position on a map or the exact direction you need to follow to reach somewhere else, estimated time to reach destination, points of interest (gates, elevators, info kiosks, bathrooms, etc).
Airports are big places with tremendous daily human traffic. Most of them have poor signage that make the traveller experience stressful and chaotic. Despite increasing user complaints about signage and poor guidance information, airports have not created any solutions to the complex problem of airport terminal navigation. AILO Foundation founders believe that any successful solution for this problem should be provided by an independent entity without any commercial interests that tend result in personal privacy exploitation and user tracking practices, hence the decision to setup as a nonprofit and launch a crowdfunding campaign to support it.
Through their Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign AILO Foundation team hopes to show to airports around the world the amount of interest their public has in this technology and its fast adoption and how the public would ultimately benefit from its implementation.
The team will work with Apple specifications to provide the most reliable and accurate experience on iOS devices. Android will also be supported. Support for Windows Phone will be added as soon as possible.
AILO Advantages:
* Allows airports to provide a more user friendly experience to their users, especially important on bigger, busier airports
* Very helpful both for occasional tourists and also for regular business travellers that have to use airports frequently
* Any interested mobile apps will benefit from it as it will be natively integrated into the smartphones mapping capabilities
* It will facilitate finding departure gates, check-in counters, info kiosks, baggage claims, duty free shops, restaurants, and several other points of interest located across the airport
When available this technology allows any mobile maps app including iOS Maps and Google Maps to:
* Display exactly where you are on a map
* Provide a virtual path directing you to your gate and letting you know how far you are and how long it will take you to get there
* Allow visually impaired people to be able to move independently inside airports with audio feedback
* Show the path you need to follow as well as relevant points of interest overlaid over the camera image while you point it around (augmented reality)
“With AILO, airport users will be able to easily navigate inside an airport using only their smartphone,” commented founders Nuno Pereira and Ana Afonso. “We believe Indoor Location technology has the potential to turn the most chaotic airport terminal into a pleasant user experience, both for the seasonal tourist and for the diehard flyer. Sadly, we feel it will take too long for airport administrations to be motivated to adopt this technology by themselves. This is why we believe AILO Foundation will have a fundamental role in the development of Indoor Location technology as a commonplace technology widely available to the public.”
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AILO Foundation on Indiegogo
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AILO Foundation is a nonprofit foundation co-founded by Nuno Pereira and Ana Afonso based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. With extensive experience in mobile apps development since 2008, they recently felt the urge to shift their focus to new projects that can potentially impact the human relationship with technology in truly significant and personal areas and help to provide new standards on everyday activities. Copyright (C) 2014 AILO Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners.