The iPointer® Platform offers a robust geographic information system (GIS) combined with a variety of tools for content management, aggregation, and delivery so that iPointer®-enabled applications have continuous availability to accurate, on-demand search results.  iST also provides a fully hosted solution for geographic data and multi-media content that is easily integrated with a broad array of points of interest (POIs) and third-party premium content options.

Building accurate search results starts with identifying the selected building or landmark. The iPointer® Geospatial Search Engine accomplishes this task by using the search criteria (position and orientation) to select the ‘most likely object’ (i.e., what you are pointing at) in its database of geographic data.

Think of geographic data as a ‘map’ of the real world represented as simple two-dimensional outlines or ‘shapes’. These shapes can be traced from aerial photographs and existing maps, or can be retrieved from existing geographic information systems (GISs). Each shape is identified by its Latitude and Longitude and (whenever possible) is linked to a postal address.  The postal address is then used for linking to many different data sources such as yellow pages, local search, and targeted advertising. Each ‘shape’ also acts as a container for multimedia content as well as other objects, which in turn can have multimedia content linked to them.

iPointer® Toolbox provides access to a number of facilities for importing GIS data, defining attributes for shapes, linking shapes to multimedia content, and more. 

The iPointer® Platform provides mobile users with a variety of content such as maps, images, audio, video, and text.

To ensure optimal performance (e.g., response time) of multimedia content, the iPointer® Toolbox allows developers to configure the iPointer® applications to take into account technical constraints, such as available bandwidth of the wireless network. For example, on a broadband network audio and video streams may be retrieved from the iPointer® Server while on a slower network images and textual information may be cached locally on the handset. Similarly, multimedia data may be stored in the iPointer® database itself or dynamically retrieved from third-party web services or (more likely) both.