[Infowarrior] - Cellphone Locator System Needs No Satellite

[Richard Forno]

June 1, 2009
Cellphone Locator System Needs No Satellite
By JENNA WORTHAM
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/technology/start-ups/01locate.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=print

BOSTON — Wanderers with phones and other devices that have GPS chips  
can figure out where they are using signals from satellites thousands  
of miles up, but those are easily blocked by walls or trees. The  
founders of Skyhook Wireless discovered some alternative navigational  
beacons: the signals coming from the Wi-Fi network in the coffee shop  
across the street, or the apartment upstairs.

Skyhook uses the chaotic patchwork of the world’s Wi-Fi networks, as  
well as cell towers, as the basis for a location lookup service that  
is built into every iPhone, making it easier to pull up a map or find  
Chinese food nearby.

The start-up was founded in 2003 by Ted Morgan and Michael Shean, who  
traveled frequently for work and noticed the proliferation of wireless  
signals each time they cracked open their laptops to check their e-mail.

“We were amazed by the sheer growth of Wi-Fi,” Mr. Morgan said in an  
interview in April at the company’s offices here. “We knew there had  
to be a new model for mapping location using those signals.”

Wi-Fi signals travel only a few hundred feet at most, so if you have a  
map of the Wi-Fi networks in a given area, you can use those signals  
to pinpoint a phone’s location.

Making that map is the tricky part. When Mr. Morgan and Mr. Shean  
decided to pursue their idea, they started building a database of Wi- 
Fi access points, along with cellphone towers, which have much more  
powerful signals.

At first they tried paying taxi drivers to carry equipment that  
silently recorded the locations of networks as they roamed the  
streets, Mr. Morgan said. Then they hired full-time drivers to cover  
ground systematically, much as Google does for its Street View  
service. Skyhook says it has scanned areas containing 70 percent of  
the country’s population.

“It doesn’t seem realistic to drive up and down every street in the  
U.S.,” Mr. Morgan said. “But you can.”

Skyhook now employs a fleet of 500 drivers to feed a database that  
spans North America, Asia and Europe. The landscape of signals changes  
constantly as people and businesses set up and take down wireless  
networks, so the scanning process never ends.

Each Skyhook car contains a laptop outfitted with antennas and  
equipment that sends out short blasts of radio waves, called probe  
requests, to detect nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi networks. The system  
calculates the source of the signals based on their strength and the  
location of the car. That information is logged in the Skyhook  
database, which includes more than 100 million wireless networks and  
700,000 cellular towers.

Skyhook’s big break came in August 2007 when Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s  
chief executive, requested a meeting with the company. Mr. Morgan said  
he initially deleted Mr. Jobs’s voice mail message, dismissing it as a  
prank, but soon realized his mistake.

Since then, Apple has sold 37 million iPhones and iPod Touches  
worldwide, all with Skyhook’s software on them. Mr. Morgan declined to  
detail specifics of Skyhook’s financial agreement with Apple, other  
than to say that his company collects a commission for each device sold.

When an iPhone owner starts up an application that involves location —  
like the restaurant finder Urbanspoon or the forecast service  
WeatherBug — the phone calculates whether it is likely to get the best  
and fastest information from its own GPS chip or from Skyhook’s  
system. Skyhook says it can provide a fix on location in seconds,  
versus up to a minute for GPS, although Skyhook is less useful in  
areas with few Wi-Fi networks.

Skyhook checks a list of nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers  
against its database and triangulates the device’s location within 30  
to 60 feet. The company says it is not connecting to those Wi-Fi  
networks, just detecting their presence. (As a backup, the iPhone can  
also use cell tower information from Google.)

Any new access points and cell towers detected by the iPhone are  
automatically added to the Skyhook database, making it, in Mr.  
Morgan’s words, “self-healing.”

Apart from Apple, Skyhook also has partnerships with AOL to allow  
people to see the location of their chat buddies, and with Navteq, a  
maker of car navigation systems. Skyhook is even embedded into Eye-Fi  
memory cards for digital cameras, where it keeps track of where photos  
are taken. The company says it handles 250 million location requests a  
day.

Skyhook has raised $16.8 million in venture capital financing from  
investors including Bain Capital Ventures and Intel Capital. Mr.  
Morgan said it was not seeking more financing right now and was  
working on expanding the business. “If we do that successfully, there  
will be plenty of good choices for us,” he said, perhaps including a  
public offering.

As Skyhook finds success and more gadgets become “location-aware,”  
competitors are likely to stake out their own share of the market,  
said Chetan Sharma, an independent telecommunications industry  
researcher.

Mr. Sharma says that Mexens Technology has a system that relies on  
user contributions to build a signal map. And a Google service called  
My Location works on many phones and uses a combination of GPS,  
cellphone towers and Wi-Fi. A Google spokeswoman, Katie Watson, said  
the company collected its signal data from several sources, including  
phones running its software.

“Skyhook is certainly ahead of the curve with its service,” Mr. Sharma  
said. “Whether they will sustain their momentum for the next five  
years remains to be seen. But they have a lot of opportunities to make  
it work.”

Charles S. Golvin, a principal analyst at Forrester Research  
specializing in mobile devices and telecommunications, agreed that  
Skyhook was well positioned. “There are so many more phones coming to  
the market that have GPS and Wi-Fi,” he said.

Mr. Golvin added: “Think about all the other devices with Wi-Fi, like  
the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, netbooks, digital cameras.”

Mr. Morgan and Mr. Shean are trying to get Skyhook onto as many  
devices as they can. Programmers who want to build location-based  
applications for phones other than the iPhone can license its  
software, and several do. The company has deals to put its software  
into chips made by Qualcomm and Broadcom, and it plans to announce a  
partnership with a major manufacturer of netbooks by the end of the  
year.

Mr. Morgan is aware of the competition. “There’s always the threat  
that Google or some other company will just give that information away  
for free,” he said. To that end, the company has filed for multiple  
patents, including ones to protect its methodology for updating its  
database. Several framed patents hang on the walls of its offices.

“But we’re hoping that our six years of driving around in cars,  
mapping out the various countries, will pay off,” he said. “We’ve done  
more than 2,000 cities. They have a long way to go.”