X
Business

Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless on the growth of location

Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless on the growth of locationSkyhook has spent seven years to make location work. Over 200 million wi-fi access points, 1.
Written by Andrew Mager, Inactive

Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless on the growth of location

Ted Morgan of Skyhook

Skyhook has spent seven years to make location work. Over 200 million wi-fi access points, 1.9 million cell towers. They have 70% population covered in the US, Europe and is expanding in Asia. They handle over 300 million location requests a day.

Skyhook's stats

Apps drive the mobile industry. Last year, there were about 3,000 location apps around. Now, just over 8,000 location apps across all of the app stores. Most of them are on iPhone (surprised?), but there are tons more "applictions" around. They are all gonna get location.

March 2010 in Location

And there are some weird ones out there. Fake Mayor allows you to say that you are the mayor in any place. It's a Foursquare spoof. Another good one is iPoo, which gives extremely interesting stats and facts about, well, the main activity do in the bathroom.

Spotrank ranks all of the places of the world based on where people are. They did a cool visualization at SxSW with SimpleGeo (disclosure).

In fact, Austin, TX was one of the most active places in the world during those days. Even more than Manhattan.

Doing visualizations like that are what really interests me.

Most locations apps are about travel, navigation, lifestyle, and productivity. The social network-type apps are growing a lot too. New categories are being created every day and they need location.

Think about Shazam, which lets your phone listen to music and tell you the artist and title of the song. How could that app leverage location?

Skyhook is launching a new product called Local Faves, a developer kit that lets you add location tagging, view nearby map views, see rankings, social networking hooks, venue.

Local Faves

Simple user actions like favoriting, sharing, checking into, tagging, and commenting are easy to add.

Finding trends and investigating location based data is very exciting. Let's see how it evolves in the next few months especially when Facebook announces a serious entry into the "check in" business. What do you think's gonna happen?

Editorial standards