Steve Jobs announced during his MacWorld keynote speech yesterday an upgrade to the Maps application for iPhone and iTouch. The new version harnesses the power of SkyHook to automatically detect your current location and have the maps application default to that point.
SkyHook works by triangulating your position from a number of cell towers and from local Wi-Fi signals. The cell tower service is provided by Google and the Wi-Fi positioning system is by SkyHook.
Skyhook Wireless CEO Ted Morgan said:
“this is obviously a big development and a significant moment for Skyhook Wireless today. There are already more than four million iPhones sold – not to mention the iPod Touch – and the Map application is a core feature on the iPhone”
The addition of SkyHook to the Google positioning service makes the positioning of users much more accurate than using the Google system alone.
Jed Rice, vice president market development at Skyhook pointed out:
“We can do 40 meters accuracy 95% of the time with just three access points.”
GPS is much more accurate but it can be argued that GPS satellite signals can be hard to get in New York -style urban canyons. In European cities, where development is still lower level and satellite navigation is ubiquitous, GPS is still the better bet.
The effectiveness of the Wi-Fi location system is dependent on the accurate mapping of Wi-Fi hotspots. SkyHook claims that 70% of the American population are ‘represented’ in their hotspot database. In Europe Ted Morgan says:
“we expect to have finished the coverage of the United Kingdom, France and Germany in March”, said Ted Morgan. “In Asia the top 15 cities will be ready by the middle of the year”
Apple has been very successful recently at wringing highly lucrative deals from service providers offering products for the iPhone that often leave observes wondering what the service providers were thinking giving Apple such a generous deal (the European telecom providers to name three. Ted Morgan was rather coy when questioned about the business model of deal with Apple saying:
“there is an economic relationship between Apple and us, but I can’t give you any more details”
So it looks like Apple’s laughing all the way to the bank again!
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[...] Steve wrote an interesting post today on SkyHook: Apple MacWorld keynote announcementsHere’s a quick excerptSteve Jobs announced during his MacWorld keynote speech yesterday an upgrade to the Maps application for iPhone and iTouch. The new version harnesses the power of SkyHook to automatically detect your current location and have the maps … [...]
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