GigaOM » Tech

My resolution: Be a better manager

Dennis Crowley — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:00:08 +0000

Dennis Crowley, the CEO of FourSquare, explains how as a company grows, the chain of communication changes and it's a difficult balance to make sure the company can be as transparent with 100 people as it is with 20 people.

At f8, Facebook to jump on the NFC train

Om Malik — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:32:21 +0000

In a matter of hours, Facebook is going to host f8, its annual developer conference. By now we have all heard everything that is coming at the event. Back in June, I had exclusively reported that Facebook will launch its Music service in partnership with Spotify and others. Mark Zuckerberg and others are going to go into great detail about the company’s push into “news” and “media.” Colleen Taylor outlines what to expect at the f8 conference.

Except there’s one more thing.

My sources are telling me that the company is going to make some sort of announcement around NFC technologies at the event as well. The Places product will have some NFC elements built into them, and the social network is working closely with some hardware vendors. I am pretty sure we are going to find out more details in a few hours.

NFC is a short-distance wireless technology, and it is likely to be a catalyst for m-commerce. Some research groups believe that by 2014, one in five phones will be NFC-enabled.

Location: It’s Just a Feature

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 14:44:05 +0000

Clear Channel Outdoors today announced a free Android version of its FLYsmart mobile application, built by Geodelic Systems, that combines flight-tracking functions with detailed airport maps and user location. Currently, FLYsmart offers maps for 20 airports, but intends to add more facilities on a frequent basis. In supported airports, FLYsmart’s maps include gate locations, ATMs, newsstands, restaurants, gift shops, clubhouses, restrooms and other amenities.

As a regular traveler, I rely on smartphone apps to manage my flight arrangements, schedule and such. Over the past few years, I’ve used TripIt for this purpose, which has long been available on the major smartphone platforms. It’s unlikely I’ll switch from TripIt to FLYsmart because the latter doesn’t include scheduling features, but it does represent the opportunity for future location-based service (LBS) apps.

There are a number of LBS apps I could use in an airport to find the nearest Starbucks, rest room or ATM. Point Inside is one we covered earlier this year, and it certainly excels at indoor navigation. While apps like this provide value, they’re often “one-hit wonders” that focus solely on navigation. To do anything else in the context of airport travel, for example, one has to leave the navigation app. By adding real-time LBS functionality to an app with other specific base features, users will ditch navigation-only apps in favor of multi-purpose app for a given context.

Earlier this year, Om suggested that 2010 could become the “year of location.” From the point of view of checking in to venues and finding nearby friends, photos or Twitter pals, I agree that location definitely became more mainstream this year. But if I were a developer, I’d be looking beyond 2010 and past the more basic applications of navigation and check-in. Instead, I’d bet the future on adding location to platforms and current apps where location is a logical value-add, not a solution in and of itself. With ABI Research recently estimating $1.8 billion for location-based mobile ad campaigns in 2015, I’d want to offer the location-based apps that do more than just basic location.

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Startups Stay Inside to Find Location's Next Big Opportunity

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:25:03 +0000

Sooner than later, pretty much every mobile phone will have some degree of location capabilities, mostly likely in the form of GPS. Indeed, you’d already be hard-pressed to find a new smartphone without support for the Global Positioning System. But while it works well outdoors or for in-vehicle navigation, what about indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate?

A number of indoor solutions based on cell-tower triangulation or Wi-Fi network databases (think SkyHook) have appeared in recent years, the newest being one from Point Inside. In December of 2009, the company announced its first product — an indoor navigation solution for Apple’s iPhone that guides consumers through shopping malls. Point Inside today follows up with support for more than 50 airports in the U.S.. By combining a proprietary location solution with indoor maps of major malls and airports, Point Inside offers guidance in places where Google Maps and others simply can’t.

I actually can use Google Maps — one of the hottest smartphone apps today — with the GPS on my Nexus One in the local mall, but without a venue map showing all of the retail stores, all I have is a blue dot blinking on a building. With Point Inside, I can get directions on my smartphone to easily navigate from the GameStop to Lenscrafters, for example. Point Inside says it now has maps covering over 100,000 stores, gates, kiosks, restrooms, elevators, and escalators in U.S. and Canadian malls and airports. And much like Foursquare, it offers retailers a geo-based way to provide promotions to a nearby consumer audience.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Nokia and a few standalone portable navigation device makers are well-entrenched with their efforts to dominate the navigation space, so startups have to be especially innovative here and find new ways to leverage navigation solutions. With that in mind, Point Inside and others like GloPos are going where the big boys don’t yet tread — in fact, Point Inside is actively soliciting for venues to use the Point Inside “Indoor Smart Map™” technology.

Malls and airports are just the lowest-hanging fruit for Point Inside. If the company can build up a large enough base of venue directories to mash up with its location solution — say, large office properties or sports venues — it could own the indoor navigation space.

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Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

Does Location Need a Special Purpose Device?

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:10:38 +0000

Qualcomm is trying to patent a removable module for devices that would contain all of your location information and allow you to share it across gadgets (hat tip GoRumors). Instead of your phone or laptop knowing where you are at all times, you plug in a module when you want to share your whereabouts. Now, this is just a patent application, so it’s not clear if anyone at Qualcomm wants to build this thing, and I’m not sure it should.

At first I thought the module might do for location what the Kindle has done for electronic readers or what the iPod did for stand-alone music devices — basically act as a single-purpose device for providing location and applications that could use it. Here’s the description:

The removable module may store subscription information, personal information, and/or other information for a user and may be inserted into a terminal, e.g., a cellular phone. The removable module may include LBS applications that may utilize location information to perform various actions. The location information may comprise a location estimate, speed, orientation, etc., of the terminal.

In other words, my location would become an accessory that I could plug in when I elect to share with people where I am and what I’m doing, rather than something tied to a particular device with complicated steps for turning location sharing on and off. Plus, I could use a variety of location apps that work with the module rather than applications that work with a specific phone.

Since the device would have my location as well as my location-using applications, I checked with some developers and those in the industry to see how something like this would play out. Rahul Sonnad, CEO of Geodelic, which makes the Sherpa application, said that most of the functionality Qualcomm seems to have developed with this module is already available as part of various web-connected platforms like Facebook Connect. He added, “I’m sure I would lose this module, and my location would be lost with it. And then where would I be?”

Without a location module, many of us might not know. All kidding aside, Sonnad’s point about already having the functionality is the key here. Sonnad as well as Ted Morgan, the CEO of Skyhook, which provides a Wi-Fi database to determine a user’s location, think that thanks to Apple, Google and other platforms already offering location services on myriad devices and shared between a variety of web-based technologies, the opportunity ship has sailed. And it’s sailed without Qualcomm. What do you guys think?

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Chokola. Diagram image courtesy of GoRumors.

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Aloqa's LBS iPhone App Just Misses the Mark

Jennifer Martinez — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:20:54 +0000

From Loopt to FourSquare, it seems like every mobile-focused startup these days wants to hop on board the location-based application train. Aloqa launched an iPhone version of its free Android and BlackBerry application last week (the startup’s CEO, Sanjeev Agrawal, spoke during a panel at our recent Mobilize conference).

Like Geodelic, Aloqa helps you find nearby points of interest — what it calls “channels” — that you can customize according to your preferences. For example, if you’d rather get a cup of coffee from Peet’s than from Starbucks or another cafe, you can subscribe to the Peet’s channel. You’re then a tap away from pulling up a map that will guide to the store location you want to visit.

After trying out Aloqa for a week, I think it’s a solid LBS app but wish that its channels included more drilled-down points of interest. We recently moved our office to the SOMA neighborhood, an area of San Francisco with which I’m still not terribly familiar. I struggled to find a place to grab a quick salad for lunch using Aloqa and wound up using my Google Maps application instead.

While Aloqa has a channel that lists nearby Yelp-reviewed restaurants, none of them offered the type of food I was looking for and none of them did takeout. (I admittedly had not looked at the fast food channel). What Aloqa did help me find was a nearby ATM for my bank and a Starbucks store closer to the one I was originally going to, which are definite pluses. There’s also a channel that notifies you when one of your Facebook friends is nearby, but only one of my friends has installed Aloqa on their phone so this hasn’t proven to be a helpful feature.

Aloqa just launched this summer, so there’s still room for improvement; hopefully we’ll soon see channels on it that point to more disaggregated points of interest. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup received $1.5 million in Series A funding this July from Wellington Partners and angel investors.

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So Why Did Apple Buy a Mapping Company?

Jordan Golson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:57:34 +0000

Apple purchased digital mapmaker Placebase in July for an undisclosed sum, according to Seth Weintraub at Computerworld. Placebase, which we wrote about last year, is a Google Maps competitor that focuses on adding layers of public and private data to existing maps with an easy-to-use API. One use for the product, called PolicyMap, layers various types of data — like home sales, crime or employment — over maps to help visualize data geographically. It’s big business, and the company was profitable without VC funding. So, why did Apple buy Placebase?

There are many reasons. For starters, it’s increasingly obvious that maps and geo-location are becoming crucial components of any modern operating system. Nokia was the first one to realize this and snapped up companies such as gate5 and Navteq.

Secondly, the acquisition allows Apple to decrease its reliance on former BFF Google. Apple could use Placebase’s technology to replace the Google Maps functionality in the iPhone and iPod touch (and the new tablet, perhaps?) with its an in-house mapping solution. The ongoing legal fight between Apple, Google and the FCC over rejected apps on the iPhone App Store is well-known, as is Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure from Apple’s board in August.

Weintraub claims the Placebase purchase closed in July, which is a curious timeline. Did Schmidt know of Apple’s plans to purchase the company, or was this an instance of him “sitting out” of a board meeting, because it was a place where Apple and Google were possibly competing?

Apple and Google are competing on more and more fronts, and Apple may be looking to cut as many ties with Google as possible in a seemingly belated attempt at keeping the fox out of the henhouse. The highest profile tie at the moment? The Google search box currently sits at the top of every Safari user’s browser window — a search box that likely sends a decently substantial amount of referral funds from Google to Apple. Given Microsoft’s need to expand its search share, it wouldn’t be inconceivable that Apple replaces Google with Bing. As long there is enough “cashback” for Apple!

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Brightkite Is Set to Relaunch

Om Malik — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:59:19 +0000

Brightkite is ready to re-launch its service. Brightkite is the company that emerged after Limbo, a Burlingame, Calif.-based startup, merged with Denver-based Brightkite. The company offers a location-based social networking service that allows folks to broadcast their location and help find bars and restaurants. When we checked tonight, we got a message announcing some pending changes. The Limbo web site also remains down for maintenance. Brightkite is competing for attention with the likes of Foursquare, a New York-based startup that has gained a cachet among the early adopter crowd.

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Aardvark Launches an iPhone App

Jennifer Martinez — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:40:58 +0000

Aardvark, a San Francisco-based startup that touts a web-based answer service, today released a similar application for the iPhone that will let you ask friends in your social graph questions on topics, such as recommended restaurants or books, and receive answers directly from your Apple handset.

The philosophy behind the service is that your friends have a wealth of knowledge you can tap into, and Aardvark helps you conduct a search of these peers to find answers to your questions. This makes it stand apart from web services like Yelp and Yahoo Answers, where you rely on the advice and opinions of people you don’t know. The free iPhone application uses Facebook Connect and lets you send questions via IM. By tapping into the iPhone’s GPS capabilities, the app can automatically tag your current location to any question you ask. By doing so, Aardvark can ask people in the same neighborhood or city as you questions about that area. Another competitor in the space is GoodRec, a recommendation site that also has an iPhone app and lets people ask their friends for reviews on various products and locations.

After downloading Aardvark to your iPhone, the app’s main page has a box where you can type in your question and send it to friends who are knowledgeable about a specific topic, such as bars or travel. Aardvark analyzes your question to figure out who to send it to, then searches for people who are available in your network to answer it. It starts searching through your friends first, and if none of them are available, starts reaching out to friends of friends. The company, which was founded by ex-Googlers, told me that the number of people on the Aardvark network is so robust, any question you submit can be answered in five minutes. Skeptical, I used the app to ask about reliable cab companies in San Francisco, and received an answer — albeit from people I didn’t know directly — in less than five minutes. I tried this out very early in the morning, so I bet I would have received an answer quicker if I asked my question later in the day.

The 25-person startup received $6 million in Series A funding in September 2008, led by August Capital. Baseline Ventures also participated in the round. Though Aardvark only has Facebook integration for now, the company said it will start integrating Twitter into the service within the next three months.

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FourSquare Gets $1.35M in Venture Funding

Jennifer Martinez — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:52:41 +0000

FourSquare, the startup behind the popular LBS mobile application of the same name, has received $1.35 million in first round funding led by Union Square Ventures and including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Union Square Ventures is also an investor in Twitter, which is launching its own LBS feature in the coming weeks.

FourSquare lets iPhone and Android mobile users “check in” and notify friends when they get to a certain location, such as a restaurant or bar; the app also includes game mechanics. The NYC-based startup was founded by Dennis Crowley, who was behind Dodgeball, a similar mobile software service that was acquired by Google in 2005.

The mobile LBS trend will be featured at our upcoming Mobilize 09 conference.

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Will Trendistic Trump Trendrr for Tracking Twitter Trends?

Jennifer Martinez — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:57:32 +0000

As we saw with the death of Michael Jackson and the Iranian election protests, statistics on tweets help to reveal how information spreads across the web. For many, Trendrr has emerged as the digital tracking service of choice, lauded for its both its ability to procure stats and charts on Twitter trends and for its easy-to-use user interface. But while some may find Trendrr’s UI intuitive, compared with a lesser-known rival, Buenos Aires-based Trendistic, I’ve found it hard to navigate. And it can require far more clicks to get to the same stats.

Flaptor’s Trendistic, formerly known as Twist, tracks and charts the percentage of tweets that mention a certain search term over time. Its Google-like UI is easy to use and quickly offers up charts on Twitter topics over the last 24 hours or even the last six months. For me, a UI’s simplicity can make or break whether I use a web app. If that’s true for other people, going forward, the tide could turn towards Trendistic.

I decided to see how the two sites stacked up when tracking tweets about Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Democratic congressman who passed away earlier this week. When I logged onto Trendrr, I entered “Ted Kennedy” and “Twitter” into the search box, and results turned up two empty data graphs that were supposed to measure the number of times the senator’s name was posted on Twitter per hour and per day. It wasn’t until I searched for simply “Ted Kennedy” and clicked to the second page of results that I was able to find relevant graphs. Even then, I struggled to read the graph that tracked the number of posts per day mentioning the politician.

But when I typed Kennedy’s name into Trendistic’s search box, a graph popped up a second later that showed the percentage of tweets that mentioned the senator over the last seven days. To view graphs that tracked tweets about him over the last 24 hours, three months or six months, I only needed to click on the tabs at the top of the page. And when I hovered over different points on the graph, it displayed the percentage of tweets that mentioned Sen. Kennedy by the hour, which according to the apex of the graph, stood at about 2.5 percent as of Wednesday at 11 p.m. PDT.

Trendistic works with any mobile browser and, just like Trendrr, its charts are embeddable. It also gives you the option to receive email notifications when a topic becomes a Twitter trend. If users find Trendistic’s UI as simple and easy to use as I do, as the number of visitors on Twitter swells, it could move to the forefront as the go-to web site for tracking Twitter trends.

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Twitter Wants to Capture LBS Mojo

Jennifer Martinez — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:40:43 +0000

Twitter plans to launch a location-based feature that reveals the latitude and longitude from which an individual is tweeting, co-founder Biz Stone revealed in a blog post today, signaling that the micromessaging site wants to hop onto the hot location-based services trend (a topic that will be featured at our upcoming Mobilize 09 conference) under way. Twitter users are currently able to read tweets from people they’re following on the site, but the new, opt-in LBS feature will enable the reading of tweets based on location. It will allow Twitter users a way to connect on a local level, offering up an additional layer of desperately needed context.

Twitter will release the LBS API to developers before integrating it on either Twitter.com or the company’s mobile web site. It will compete with Google Latitude, a mobile- and web-based app that displays the locations of a user’s friends at any given time, as well as Loopt, Four Square and a host of other LBS mobile apps. In the meantime, the upcoming LBS feature announcement probably isn’t sitting well with the developers of Twitter-based mobile applications who pioneered essentially the same offering months before, including Twinkle, UberTwitter and Tweetmondo.

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Coming Soon to a Phone Near You: Yet Another Ad

Jordan Golson — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:26:33 +0000

The mobile advertising business is the place to be these days. AdMob, a mobile ads specialist, is about to serve its 100 billionth impression — you can watch the numbers tick up on the firm’s home page. To be sure, the number on its own is a bit meaningless, but it reminds us that while much of the advertising industry continues to struggle — in 2009, according to Veronis Suhler estimates, newspaper ad revenue will be down 18.7 percent to $35.5 billion, radio down 11.7 percent to $15.8 billion, and broadcast TV down 10.1 percent to $43 billion — mobile is a bright light on a dark night, and it’s going to keep exploding. The firm expects mobile ad revenue to surge 18.1 percent this year, to $1.3 billion.

Indeed, with worldwide smartphone shipments expected to grow 13 percent in 2009, ads are going mobile. Google has been releasing new mobile products at a swift pace, even launching its own mobile operating system, Android, to grab users and, eventually, show them ads. In an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that while mobile ads can be difficult to target and deliver, mobile — particularly location-based mobile — is the holy grail of advertising — and this is just the beginning. From the interview:

What are the biggest challenges the mobile Web presents?
Let’s start with the fact that the phones are not fast, the networks are not as capable, the ad formats are not standardized. But on the other hand it’s very, very important to solve those problems because a phone is very personal. And so if we know a fair amount about a person, with their permission we can target a useful ad—you know, “It’s Eric. You had a hamburger yesterday, do you want pizza today? There’s a pizza store on the right.” That kind of ad is likely worth a lot of money to an advertiser because it will generate a sale.

In other words, you send a message to the person’s cell phone, saying: “Look, we know you had a burger yesterday. If you want pizza today, just go around the block”?
Right. It may sound creepy, but it might also be quite valuable. People could use advice as to what to eat and where the food is—and of course you can turn it off. So the important thing here is advertising that has value to the person is advertising that is a valuable business. That’s the business we’re in.

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Will Cloud-based Mobile Enterprise Apps Ever Catch On?

Jennifer Martinez — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:21:51 +0000

While a good number of consumer mobile applications have tapped into the cloud, so far, only a handful of enterprise mobile applications have done the same. And the members of a panel of VCs at a “Mobilize the Cloud” event earlier this week at Google said they don’t think enterprise apps for mobiles will catch up any time soon. In fact, some think they never will.

The panelists agreed that developers face a set of design hurdles when it comes to developing enterprise cloud-based mobile applications, such as addressing security concerns and ensuring the availability of data and consistent performance. Addressing these challenges is expensive for developers, especially young startups, which is one of the major reasons why only a small number of enterprise mobile apps — from the likes of Salesforce.com, Workday and Rackspace — are available. Venrock’s Dev Khare, who prior to joining the VC firm co-founded mobile application software company Covigo, warned startups that the return on investment for mobile applications remains soft and that the systems integration work for building custom enterprise applications has low margins. In light of the cost involved, there’s really no benefit to be had for small companies by building enterprise applications, Khare said.

It’s not all doom and gloom on the enterprise side, however. Greylock Partners’ David Thacker believes that enterprise mobile apps have a chance to innovate with location-based services. He didn’t give any examples, but some possible options would be vehicle fleet tracking or inventory management. But with enterprise mobile applications rolling out at a sluggish pace, who knows when these LBS offerings will hit the market.

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Why Location Awareness Will Make the Web More Useful

Om Malik — Thu, 21 May 2009 01:26:45 +0000

We are starting to experience the “problem of plenty” on the web, which is making it difficult to find information. It’s a problem being driven in large part by the availability of the vast number of tools that make publishing to the web a breeze.

At the same time, we are woefully lagging when it comes to creating tools that ease the consumption of content. For precisely those reasons, I believe that the web has to become more dynamic, more intelligent and will need a degree of serendipity. And that will give us the ability to find the content we like and want to consume without making much of an effort.

Location-aware services are perhaps the best way to provide that context. For the longest time, we have associated such location-services with automobile navigation devices and mobile phones. But recent efforts, most notably those of Yahoo, have brought location into the realm of the wired web. Here are some recent announcements that point to the emergence of a location-aware web.

Earlier this year, Google announced that its location service will be part of the Mozilla Firefox 3.5 browser.
Nokia today announced an Ovi Maps Player API, a simple way to embed Ovi Maps into any compatible web site using basic JavaScript. These web sites can then be synchronized with people’s mobile phones.
In addition to FireEagle, Yahoo announced the availability of Placemaker, a way to geo-enrich any web content.

Of the three recent developments, Yahoo’s is the most important.

Fire Eagle, which acts as a location broker that allows users to take their location to the Web. Now, with Placemaker, we can help developers and publishers make applications and data sets location-aware by determining the whereness of unstructured content. Once users share their location information using FireEagle, we help provide hyper-local information based on their geography, adding value to content that is delivered to them wherever they are.

You can send unstructured data to the Placemaker and it spits out such data in a location-aware format. Since most of the geo-data is available in the form of longitude and latitude coordinates, mapping them is essential. Placemaker instead goes one step further — it marries these coordinates to place names. So various versions of place names such as San Francisco, San Fran and even Frisco will be mapped to the coordinates.

When a publisher sends in the unstructured data, Placemaker finds these words and makes them location-aware. Paul Bonanos reported on Yahoo’s new search direction yesterday, which will essentially involve the search engine pivoting its search focus around “objects.” Marry those objects to location-aware content, and suddenly you have a platform for hyper-local advertising. Other applications will follow.

While the location-aware web isn’t going to show up tomorrow, at least we’ve started the journey toward it. Otherwise we’d find ourselves lost in what is going to be a massive data deluge.

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iPhone is Boosting Demand For Location-Based Services

Om Malik — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:00:15 +0000

Nearly two years ago, I outlined five reasons Apple’s iPhone will change the wireless business, the foremost being increased web usage on mobile phones. I should have added another item to that list: catalysing location-based services and applications that use geolocation data to enhance their functionality. One company that’s benefiting from this trend is Boston-based Skyhook Wireless. The 6-year-old company got a big boost when Apple decided to include its core technology in the iPhone platform.

In early days, Skyhook was more like FON, but since then it has changed its focus and developed a technology that uses Wi-Fi, GPS and cell towers to collect location data, which it in turn resells to everyone from mobile phone makers to tiny startups that develop mobile apps. With Apple having shown the way, suddenly everyone is showing a renewed interest in location-based services, said Ted Morgan, Skyhook founder and CEO.

“Thanks to the popularity of iPhone, we are seeing more and more apps using geo-data,” Morgan pointed out. For instance, game developers are using geolocation data to build location-based leader boards. “The iPhone has unleashed location-based creativity,” he said. Last year, I pointed out that “in order for LBS to be on mobile phones, we need applications, which is where I believe the iPhone plays a vital role. Its large screen and built-in GPS (and now its 3G speeds) enable and encourage truly interesting LBS applications.”

Last year, there were only a few dozen apps that incorporated location-based data. This year that number has grown to 2,000 apps. Next year there will be five times as many apps that utilize location-based data.
There are nearly 200 million geolocation queries on Skyhook’s system. In comparison, Google is searched more than a billion times a day.

Those numbers should be enough for LBS skeptics to take a fresh look at location-based services. ABI Research predicts that location-based services will be a $13 billion business by 2013 vs. $515 million in 2008. Morgan says that the next big location push is going to come from the netbooks and adds, “Most laptop and netbook makers are building location-functionality into their devices.” Next up — non-computing devices such as WiFi-enabled cameras.

This opportunity hasn’t gone unnoticed, attracting more attention and competition to Skyhook. And there is no one bigger than Google.

Once Skyhook was designed into the iPhone, Google folks took notice of Skyhook and started to develop their own competitive offering, which is being offered for free, while Skyhook charges for its offering. Morgan admits that the company has lost a couple of deals because of free offerings. For instance, the X2 edition of Sony Xperia phone (Windows Mobile-based) uses geolocation data from Google.

Morgan is confident that his company has a better offering. For instance, the Skyhook team travelled 2 million miles around the world to build a Wi-Fi access point database. Morgan claims that Skyhook covers nearly 70 percent of Europe and the U.S. along with major Asian cities. In comparison, Google has plotted half-a-dozen cities in the U.S. thus far. By offering Latitude, Google hopes to overcome some of those shortcomings. Nokia, Useful Networks and uLocate are some of the other companies competing with Skyhook.

There are a couple of reasons why Skyhook continues to gain market traction. First, it offers a simpler pricing scheme than, say, cell phone companies, which charge on a per-lookup basis. It also benefits from the fact that it’s a neutral provider, making it more attractive as a partner for chip makers such as Broadcom and software companies such as browser-maker Opera. And, of course, Apple.

With millions of iPhones likely to be sold in months to come, Skyhook is all set to be off-the-hook.

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