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In very few occasions, a firm like SITUM can brag about them being only backed up financially by a university. But, this is really the case with Situm, a 2 year-old-company that is the brainchild of 3 students and professors of the Galician colleges. After a previous and thorough research, developed at the University of Santiago for over 5 years, this gave way to the incorporation of a spin off company. In spite of its short life span within this sector, Situm has been successfully reaching out for the international markets of indoor geolocation technology. Their development of a state of the art technology firm has helped them win several industry awards, amongst them the first edition of the Galicia Spin-off awards in the Idea Emergente category (Newcomers best idea).
Víctor Alvárez, CEO of Situm, explains that the 3 college students began their research within the scope of robotics. Then, they wanted a robot to be able to find out the whereabouts of people and track their last moves. The growing technology at that time was very expensive and complex to get it installed inside of buildings. However, after 5 years of hard research, they managed to develop a project, which allowed them to pursue their goals without actually installing any device inside of the buildings. “Once we worked out together on the project we managed to move all the algorithms into a smartphone. Its a sort of google maps but aimed at indoor spaces”, he says.
Situm technology is now available in 23 different countries
Although, they have been working hard on the research of other apps and products, for now Situm has successfully positioned themselves within the field of indoor geolocation technology, which allows any mobile devices to track the location of users and objects indoors. These apps are becoming fast-growing and a necessary tool to locate specific offices in a huge building, or find out where some one has parked the car in a packed parking lot with thousands of vehicles. Situm technology is now available in 23 different countries.
Nevertheless, the paid version of this app is only available in Spain, Japan and Colombia. Hopefully, many different companies and institutions will purchase this app soon in over 23 countries where it’s been tested so far. The app is even active, as we speak, in a new Hospital in Lugo, Spain.
The cost and installation of this GPS device in a building ranges from 3,000 to 30,000 euros a year, always relying on what side of this technology one wants to use.
Situm’s main competition, within a brand new sector like this, is the rival company from Finland IndoorAtlas, which funnily enough is a company that was born and bred out of a Finnish college,too.
