CSR Takes Location to the Next Level with Offerings Enabling Indoor Location and Premium In-Vehicle Infotainment for Mainstream.
Kanwar Chadha, CMO and board member of CSR and founder of SiRF, announces CSR’s two new platforms
Today we at CSR are very proud to announce new products that will take location to the next level and enable exciting new applications that significantly improve the user experience. The products are SiRFstarV with SiRFusion – an end-to-end location platform – and SiRFprimaII, a complete auto infotainment platform.
Distribution of information is changing profoundly. Until recently, PCs held the content and applications for information delivery, we are moving to a cloud-connected world. This will have a major impact on how we use products and location technologies.
Location has traditionally been associated with navigation, but is now becoming a fundamental contextual element for delivering relevant information from the cloud to people on the go. Regardless of where people are – indoors or outdoors, in their cars, or walking – more accurate and reliable location is essential to enhance the consumer experience with a broad range of applications. That fundamental shift – from auto navigation to location with you all the time – needs to work seamlessly from outdoors to indoors.
In launching SiRFstarV, our new location platform, we are fusing multiple technologies together to enable true indoor location. It supports signals from multiple satellites – not just GPS, but Russia’s Glonass, China’s Compass and Europe’s Galileo – and will also support multiple radio signals including Wi-Fi, cellular and other signals to make indoor location better. We are also taking data from various sensors such as gyros to augment location accuracy. This combination of satellite, radio and sensor signals will give consumers a better location experience.
We’ve also greatly improved power management: when you switch on your navigation/location, your battery is compromised significantly. To address that, we have employed very sophisticated power management – looking at location as a whole and managing power depending on needs of each individual application.
The second product we’re introducing today is SiRFprimaII, a complete, connected auto infotainment system platform. SiRFprimaII has more than location in it – it also provides complete visualisation capability to bring a next-generation experience. It’s like augmented reality: you can see not only maps but the buildings around it and other things beyond your visual range, which makes the navigation experience much better, and boosts safety because you have a better idea of your environment as you drive around.
Our goal is to bring this down to a few hundred dollars to ensure widespread consumer adoption.
