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Posted by Monty Solomon on January 23, 2008, 12:03 pm
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You are here
And Skyhook knows it
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff | January 21, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO - In the geek equivalent of a Super Bowl ad, Skyhook
Wireless got a shoutout at the Macworld expo last week, putting the
Boston technology firm in the same company as tech giants like Intel
Corp. and Google Inc.
Apple Inc.'s chief executive, Steve Jobs, revealed in his keynote
speech that Skyhook helps power a new location-awareness feature
that's available on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows the sleek
devices to home in on their current location using WiFi technology.
"There's no GPS inside the phone . . . how do we actually arrive at
the location?" Jobs said, demonstrating the location-finding ability
on an iPhone by plotting a route from the convention center to the
nearest Apple store - without having to type in his starting point.
"We're working with two companies to do that: Google, and a company
called Skyhook Wireless . . . we're using both of them, and it works
pretty doggone well," he said.
Skyhook's technology uses signals from WiFi hot spots to triangulate
and find a person's location, instead of using a chip that lets a
mobile device communicate with the satellite-based Global Positioning
System.
Skyhook, founded in 2003 by Ted Morgan and Michael Shean, has
gathered and catalogued the WiFi fingerprint of streets in thousands
of US cities and towns by driving along roads and collecting the
unique signatures of 23 million WiFi signals that flow out of houses,
businesses, and public access points. The company uses that data to
let WiFi-enabled devices know where they are.
...
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/01/21/you_are_here/
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