Indoor location and positioning
Pole Star announces the acquisition of Maple High Tech
With this strategic acquisition, Pole Star is strengthening its expertise in Ultra-Wide Band technology to integrate it into NAO® suite
Toulouse and Evanston, June 10, 2020
Pole Star has acquired Maple High Tech®, a Toulouse company specialized in UWB or Ultra-Wide Band technology which makes it possible to achieve decametric location accuracy in 3 dimensions. The expertise and solution of Maple High Tech® will accelerate the integration of this technology into the Pole Star Indoor geolocation platform, NAO® Suite.
« We are delighted with the Maple High Tech® acquisition which will enable us to speed up our Product roadmap and to satisfy market needs for very accurate location of assets and people in healthcare organizations, industrial sites, highly sensitive non-conventional sites, and workplaces in Europe and all over the world. With the acquisition of Maple High Tech®, we are going to integrate UWB technology into NAO® suite which will enable to implement new use cases from a single gateway: our NAO Cloud® platform.” says Christian Carle, CEO of Pole Star.
Maple High Tech® is an engineering company which has designed and prototyped a UWB based indoor location system, in particular to answer needs regarding the safety of people and assets on indoor sites and campuses.
A leader and pioneer on the indoor location market, Pole Star provides turnkey indoor location services including: infrastructure, indoor location engines for smartphones as well as for asset tracking, integrated applications, geographic statistics and data access via the NAO Cloud® platform. This comprehensive set of services is a simple, unique suite to implement and manage indoor location solutions serving a very wide range of location needs on client sites.
The integration of UWB will further expand the capacity of NAO suite, consolidating its role as a unique gateway to indoor location while offering the best cost/performance balance for all of a client’s site needs.
« Joining Pole Star is excellent news for our clients and partners who now will be able to benefit from first class mature, proven, validated, reliable solutions. This integration is also an accelerator in terms of innovation and hence reinforces a product offer that is always at the forefront of market needs.” says François Babin, Founder of Maple High Tech®.
About UWB:
UWB is a short range wireless communications technology which uses radio waves with a very high bandwidth of several hundred MHz.
The IEEE 802.15.4z recent standardization, the organization of UWB industrials within the UWB Alliance and the consortium FiRa, the recent integration of UWB in the latest generation iPhone® Apple®, and the engagement of Samsung® in this technology have opened up prospects for very wide dissemination of this technology, with an expected reduction in its cost and the development of a UWB ecosystem.
About indoor location
While outdoor location has become very popular with the use of satellite systems such as GPS or Galileo, the location of assets and people inside buildings (indoors) was not very accurate and even was impossible with satellites.
Indoor location is now essential for a wide range of indoor environments such as industrial sites, healthcare institutions, transportation hubs such as train stations, subways, and airports and any venue that accommodates large numbers of visitors and users, in order to make these sites more welcoming, safer, and more flexible while optimizing usage.
Today, indoor location is at the core of our clients’ and partners’ strategic digital transformation projects. Acutely aware that there is no single technology that meets every need, Pole Star has based NAO® suite on a multi-technology hybridization and fusion approach. The acquisition of Maple High Tech® is right in line with this strategy.
About Pole Star
Pole Star is a leading player in the indoor location field.
Founded in 2002, the company designs, develops and deploys indoor location solutions adapted to all site sizes and indoor and outdoor campuses. The Pole Star offer answers the needs of managing the flow of goods and people, optimizing space and processes, guidance and access to contextual information, security, management and optimization of mobile equipment.
Pole Star solutions are deployed in over 35 countries around the world and the company makes 70% of its revenues in exports. Committed to innovation and the sustainability of its solutions, Pole Star devotes 20% of its revenues to R&D in order to deliver the best technological and technical evolutions to its clients. Pole Star is based in France in Toulouse (head office) and in the United States in Chicago and via its partners in the United Arab Emirates and in Australia.
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See the Press Release
