Portland indoor mapping startup Meridian has been sold to Aruba Networks for an undisclosed sum, reports the Oregonian today.

Meridian helps people find their way within large buildings, such as malls, stadiums or airports, and enables marketing directed at a phone’s precise location.

Aruba Networks is a wireless LAN vendor selling access points, mobility controllers, and network management software through their Airwave Management Platform product.

AirWave is Aruba’s network management platform. It’s a multi-vendor multi-architecture tool that supports wired and wireless infrastructure from manufacturers such as Aruba, Cisco, Motorola/Symbol, and others. Aruba’s context-aware Wi-Fi architecture lets the network pinpoint Apple devices and apps.

Aruba’s HybridControl lets service providers support more than 32,000 Wi-Fi hotspots with a single Aruba 7200 Mobility Controller to offer private Wi-Fi for managed services and public Wi-Fi for cellular offload.

Cellular offload and location-based advertising is hot, especially in malls and large public venues.

“GPS-based wayfinding solutions are extraordinarily popular, but they don’t work well indoors,” said Keerti Melkote, founder and Chief Technology Officer at Aruba Networks. “We intend to address that gap by creating ‘indoor GPS’ using Aruba’s Wi-Fi infrastructure and Meridian’s wayfinding platform.

Meridian pinpoints a smartphone’s location inside a venue, relying either on GPS technology or with localized wireless networks from Cisco and other communications networking companies.

The company’s newest update allows geo-fence style app push notifications by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon, they get a push notification.

Companies that have used Meridian software for location-aware mobile applications include Boston Children’s Hospital, Powell’s City of Books, Las Vegas Sands, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City.

Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History brought its exhibits of giant, prehistoric lizards to life with a context-aware Meridan app that uses a WiFi network operated by AT&T and Cisco’s contextual data analytics, embedded in their hotspots. The app is available from Meridian but is most easily accessible from the iTunes Store and from Google Play.

Robert Scoble talked with Jeff Hardison of Portland-based Meridian about the Meridian approach to location-based services.

Plans call for retaining — and expanding — Meridian’s Portland office following today’s deal, according to Drew Bernard, a Meridian board member and member of the Oregon Angel Fund, which backed the company. The Oregon Angel Fund led a $1 million investment round in Meridian in 2011.

Meridian has 14 employees, 11 of them at the Portland headquarters. Chief executive Kiyo Kubo splits his time between Portland and Oakland, Calif. Meridian isn’t exactly a startup. They’ve been working on virtual tours since the Palm Pilot days at MIT.

ABI Research says the indoor location market is set to reach a significant number of installations in 2015-2017.

The Internet Advertising Bureau reports mobile advertising generated $3.4 billion in 2012, or 9 percent of total internet ad revenue in 2012. Location-based services are expected to generate $10 billion in revenue by 2016, according to Strategy Analytics. Over half will come from location-based search advertising.

Seed accelerators have mushroomed in recent years. Oregon ranks 4th nationally for mobile app-intensive economies.

Portland Startup Incubators include the Portland Incubator Experiment, Nike+ Accelerator, run by TechStars, PSU Business Accelerator, Upstart Labs, TiE Pearl Incubator, and Oregon Technology Business Center. Co-working space for startups in Portland includes NedSpace, Collective Agency, Beam Development, General Automotive and ADX.

Startup PDX Challenge may winnow some 240 applicants down to 16 semi-finalists. Six will receive a $10,000 working capital grant, a full year of rent-free office space in Portland’s Produce Row.

The Technology Association of Oregon, Oregon Entrepreneur Network, Oregon Angel Fund, and Portland Seed Fund are some organizations that provide investment capital and advice for a variety of incubators. Portland Development Commission sponsors a Startup PDX Challenge, Portland State sponsors a CleanTech Challenge and OSU sponsors a Venture Accelerator.

Silicon Valley’s incubator, Y Combinator, has become the model for many incubators. They run a three-month program for startups to polish their products for presentation to the investor community. Twice a year startup incubators generally invest a small amount of money ($14-20k + a small ownership percentage) in a large number of startups. The startups work intensively to refine their product and pitch to investors.

Events like Portland’s Demolicious and Portland Startup Weekend show off the best projects to investors and the general public.

Angels and Mentors have facilitated funding for Athletepath, Cloudability, Chirpify, Elemental Technologies, Geoloqi, GlobeSherpa, New Relic, Puppet Labs, Urban Airship and Zapproved among many others.

HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and PHP make webapps interoperable. PhoneGap makes them mobile.

Related Dailywireless articles include; Spotlight Mobile’s Meridian: Indoor GPS, Hotspot 2.0 for Museums & Transit, Indoor Location Without GPS, Qualcomm & Cisco Team for WiFi Location, Real-time Transit Maps, Apps for The City, Free Mobile Development for Cities & Governments, Augmented History, Public Safety 2.0, Mobile Portland Demos, Developer Contests, Geo Tours, Where Conference 2012, Mobile Demolicious in Portland, Geolocation Takes Off , Portland Mobile Developers, Google Crisis Response Mapping, Walmart Labs Buys Mobile Develeoper Small Society , Spotlight Mobile’s Meridian: Indoor GPS, Mobile Portland Demos, Seattle’s South Lake Union: Tech Hub, Google Maps Indoors, Where 2.0 – 2011, Nokia: Location Via White Space, Indoor Location Alliance Formed, Cisco Small Cells, AT&T: 40,000 Small Cells, Microsoft Sponsors Free WiFi in NYC & SF, Chicago Announces Free WiFi in Parks,

Canada’s four wireless players are maneuvering for advantage reports the Globe and Mail.

It would represent a failure in the government’s years-long push to create more competition in the wireless business, according to the Globe and Mail. Mobile Service in Canada is Overpriced and Anti-Competitive, according to numerous studies.

Mobilicity is one of three small companies to have launched service since 2009 to take advantage of the governments’s policy of encouraging new entrants. Public Mobile is believed to be seeking a buyer or financial partner, and Wind Mobile, owned by Vimpelcom, a Dutch company, has also suggested it would be interested in selling its stake in Wind

Telus, which is Canada’s second-largest wireless carrier with some 7.7 million mobile subscribers, began takeover talks with Mobilicity earlier this year. The Vancouver-based telco says the deal would ensure that Mobilicity’s 250,000 customers experience no interruption in service. It also plans to keep Mobilicity’s 150 employees.

• Telus hopes to buy faltering carrier Mobilicity for $380-million.
• Rogers Communications announced an “option deal” to eventually purchase wireless spectrum from Shaw Communications. Rogers wants to use those radio waves to add capacity to its wireless network in key western markets. Rogers won’t formally apply to take control of that asset until the fall of 2014, t
• Bell Canada (BCE) is in the middle of its blockbuster acquisition of Astral Media, but CEO George Cope says that would not prevent the telecom giant from becoming an acquirer of rival wireless carriers if Ottawa allows for such deals.
• Wind Mobile has potential bidders including the major incumbents and private-equity firm Catalyst Capital Group. Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris is also partnering with Wind CEO and chairman Anthony Lacavera on a potential buyout of the Toronto-based carrier.

Engadgetreports a fleet of camera-equipped, remote-controlled blimps are live-streaming Google I/O on YouTube, right now, It’s called Google AirShow and it’s taken over the airspace within Moscone Center.

Chris Miller, a software engineer with AKQA (Facebook), explained to Engadget they use an off-the-shelf model airship that’s flown manually via standard a 2.4GHz radio.

Each blimp is outfitted with a servo-controlled USB camera and 5GHz USB WiFi dongle which are both connected to a Raspberry Pi board running Debian, VLC and Python. A custom-designed Li-polymer battery system powers the on-board electronics.

The webcam encodes video as motion-JPEG (720p, 30fps) and VLC generates a YouTube-compatible RTSP stream that’s broadcast over WiFi. Python’s used to pan the servo-controlled camera via the Raspberry Pi’s PWM output.

By the way, Portland’s PDXDrones May Fly-in is tonight.

Here are some of Dat Nguyen pictures from last month’s fly-in in an abandoned school yard in Southeast Portland.

Google Play for Education marks an entirely new addition to the Google Play Store. Google Play for Education is like an app store designed especially for teachers with some powerful management tools built-in.

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerg introduced it yesterday at Google I/O. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools. It enables administrators to distribute applications to multiple users, quickly and easily.

Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs.

Combining Google Play for Education with Google Apps for Education could help leverage Google in its competition with Apple and attract new users.

The Google Play Books service is also getting updated with a significant new feature: user uploads. It hasn’t rolled out to all users yet, but those with access are now able to add up to 1,000 PDF and EPUB files to their Google Play online library. Both the Android and iOS versions of the app will be able to read these files starting today.

Google is opening up its book ecosystem to users who have their own ebooks (without DRM) to read. The new Google Play Books app is available on Google Play and Apple’s iTunes store. A thousand files at 50MB each comes to 50GB. That’s a lot more than what Amazon offers in the Kindle Cloud, and it is also a lot more than the free storage available from cloud storage services.

Ebooks now represent 20 percent of the trade (consumer) book industry in the U.S., according to BookStats, an annual report from the Association of American Publishers. Consumer ebooks netted publishers $3.042 billion in revenue in 2012, up 44 percent over 2011. The biggest eBook sellers remains Adult Fiction, with Children’s/Young Adult also showing strong numbers.

Ebooks made up 20% of trade publishing net sales in 2012, an increase from 2011 when ebooks were only 15% of trade net sales and single-handedly drove $995 million in net new dollars in trade sales, with total U.S. net book sales for 2012 at $27.1 billion.

Audiobooks also saw healthy gains in 2012, with revenue up 21.8% year-over-year to $241 million. This is primary due to large marketing campaigns by Audible and Overdrive and the ability for authors to now self-publish their own audiobooks.

BookStats calculates the entire U.S. trade book industry at $15.049 billion, up 6.9 percent from 2011. The total U.S. book market — including educational and professional/scholarly publishing — was $27.12 billion in 2012, BookStats estimates, down 0.9 percent from 2011.

eBooks Will Account for 50% of All Books Sold by 2016 according to a Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ Media Outlook study last year. Global spending on electronic books will grow from 4.9 percent in 2011 to 17.9 percent in 2016.

New wireless customers are choosing no-contract over contract by 10 to 1, reports Fierce Wireless. The 10 to 1 margin in favor of prepaid in the first quarter is quite significant, says Roger Entner.

Tracfone, a no contract operator, became the fastest growing carrier in the United States with 839,000 new customers, in the first quarter of 2013, followed by Verizon Wireless with 720,000 and a resurging T-Mobile with 579,000. The industry grew by a total of 1.36 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2013.

Sprint, Clearwire and Leap were the only carriers losing customers. Sprint lost customers due to further declines on the Nextel side, Clearwire’s losses were due to the switch of Sprint from WiMAX to LTE, and Leap’s decline in users was due to being undercut by lower cost offers from other carriers and from Lifeline.

Meanwhile, churn has continued to move towards historic lows as an indicator of increased customer satisfaction, reports Fierce Wireless.

Android and iOS accounted for 92% of Q1 2013 smartphone shipments, according to IDC, as Windows Phone passes BlackBerry.

Today Google announced they’re buying a quantum computer from D-Wave Systems. NASA’s Ames Research Center will host the computer at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which will house the machine.

The Universities Space Research Association (USRA) will invite researchers from around the world to share time on it. Their stated goal is to study how quantum computing might advance machine learning.

According to the NY Times, the machine Google and NASA will use makes use of the interactions of 512 quantum bits, or qubits, to determine optimization. They plan to upgrade the machine to 2,048 qubits when this becomes available, probably within the next year or two. That machine could be exponentially more powerful.

Nearby Lawrence Livermore and New Mexico’s Los Alamos compete in nuclear weapons research. New Mexico’s White Sands averages almost 350 days of sunshine per year, with a very low precipitation level, which makes it ideal for laser communications.

See Dailywireless: Los Alamos: We’re Quantum, too!, Quantum Leap in Optical Space Communications? and The Quantum Space Race