Thursday, February 19. 2009

The Wi-Fi Infrastructure of LBS; Skyhook’s 100 Million Hotspot Baby

100 Million is a big number but that’s how many Wi-Fi hotspots Skyhook Wireless has compiled for its Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS). And that’s also the number of location-based searches that Skyhook can account for in any given day, according to Ted Morgan, Skyhook Wireless’ CEO. “Google does 250 Million searches per day.” So, by comparison, location is making a significant impact in the search business.

Again, according to Morgan, when you understand that even the cellular carriers only do 1 million location-based searches each day, the number of Wi-Fi based location searches is impressive.

So, I asked Morgan what’s happening to LBS especially during the global economic meltdown. Morgan pointed to a couple of factors driving adoption both from the consumer and the software application developer’s perspective.

1. INFRASTRUCURE. The infrastructure is there with more GPS chips on the handset and Wi-Fi hotpots providing positioning technology. In reality, LBS is starting from scratch and things like the iPhone are seeing incredible growth.
2. APPLE. Apple, for example, has an open platform on which to build applications. Software developers can create and launch an app in less than 2 months, and since the opening of the Apple App Store, over 1200 applications have been location enabled. Dealing with a carrier may be a 6-9 month process of bringing an application to market.
3. UNCHARTED TERRITORY: There is no hesitation by app developers to try new stuff; some are looking at different business models and learning to fail fast. Look at Trapster, an application that uses crowd-sourced information to location police speed traps…They’ve had over 400,000 downloads of their application since it launched on the iPhone.

Posted by Joe Francica in LBS, Wi-Fi at 20:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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