Three possibilities

The three main business cases for indoor location will be promotion, recreation or gaming, and emergency response, or a "personal OnStar" system on phones instead of cars, said Kanwar Chadha, chief marketing officer of location silicon vendor CSR.

However, the technology will need to overcome some hurdles before it's widely adopted. For one thing, indoor systems that rely on beacons carry a high cost. "To deploy, operate and manage beacons economically ... will be tough," said David Allen, chief technology officer of Locaid.

Location-based social networking company FourSquare thinks indoor location mechanisms could help it identify a user's position more precisely, leading to better recommendations to other FourSquare users in public buildings such as malls and airports. But like some other mobile app developers, it needs the technology to go mainstream first.

"As long as it's not broadly available on all platforms, it's probably not something that we can use," said Holger Luedorf, vice president and head of business development at FourSquare.