Indoor positioning company Sensewhere has launched its new system for indoor advertising and released a free SDK aimed at increasing adoption of the technology.

The system needs no new infrastructure beyond existing wireless networks, and doesnt represent a large power drain, but enables user-targeting with an accuracy of 10 metres or less.

Sensewhere hopes to disrupt the established commercial structure of indoor advertising by offering its SDK for free to mobile platform providers and handset manufacturers. Companies who adopt the technology also have the ability to earn revenue by contributing to the crowd-sourced location database that Sensewhere is building up, which has been successfully trialled in Seoul, San Francisco and Rio.

“We believe our cutting edge technology coupled with a no-risk commercial model will radically change the world of indoor location,” said Rob Palfreyman, CEO of Sensewhere. “While other positioning companies measure themselves by number of venues covered, customers equipping their devices with Sensewhere can benefit from global venue coverage in a very short period of time with zero cost to build the database.

“Crucially, our system enables marketers to roll out indoor positioning campaigns at low cost and without the need for any hardware. The potential for indoor positioning and proximity marketing is huge if even a fraction of overall retail sales are attributed to the information the technology gives to retailers, so we are confident that there will be significant interest in our regional, crowd-sourced databases.”