One more way to find yourself

When the technological winds shift, and start blowing hard in a new direction, entrepreneurs like Ted Morgan do whatever it takes to build a boat and raise the sails. Some of them get carried someplace wonderful; others find their little craft disintegrating under their feet, and are lucky if they can swim back to shore.

In 2003, Morgan and Mike Shean were working in sales and marketing at Edocs, a Natick company that makes online billing software. The two colleagues noticed that WiFi networks were springing up everywhere, and felt that ''something was going on that was greater than the hype," Morgan says. Late in the spring of 2003, they left Edocs.

They wondered if a business could be built around tuning in to these WiFi networks on a mobile device to get a fix on location, creating a system that'd essentially serve as an earthbound version of GPS, the global positioning system. GPS devices can encounter accuracy issues in urban areas, when signals from the satellites bounce off buildings, or when GPS users go indoors or underground. Morgan and Shean believed that a WiFi positioning system might perform better.

And it seemed like navigational tech was about to explode in importance. Conferences started to spring up, and a new three-letter acronym was coined: LBS, or location-based services.

Morgan took out a second mortgage on his house, and lined up some consulting projects to support his family. ''It was pure boot-strapping," he says. Morgan and Shean drove around Boston in Morgan's Ford Explorer, with a laptop perched on the dashboard and antennas stuck to the roof. ''I found 700 WiFi access points just around my house in Needham," he says.

Their idea: map all of the known WiFi networks in a metropolitan area, then create software that would calculate a user's location based on the WiFi networks his laptop (or any other WiFi-fluent device, like a PocketPC) could ''see" at a given moment. If the laptop can identify three networks -- two it knows are on Newbury Street, and one that's on Massachusetts Avenue, for example -- it might determine that it's on the corner of Mass. Ave. and Newbury Street. The more networks it can see simultaneously, the more accurate the locational fix.

''If you can tune in to five to 10 access points, you can figure your accuracy within 20 to 30 meters," Morgan says.

Morgan says his company, now called Skyhook Wireless, found just over 50,000 WiFi networks by canvassing places like Watertown, Brookline, Roxbury, Cambridge, and Newton. (He expects to find even more as the company creates maps that extend all the way to Route 128.) Drivers hired by Skyhook travel every street in a neighborhood to build the company's database of live WiFi networks; no word on how many times the cops were called.

A user of Skyhook's software doesn't actually need to log on to any of the WiFi networks to figure her position, and some of the networks may well be password-protected. But every WiFi base station will send out an ID number when hit with a blast of radio-frequency energy from the WiFi card inside a laptop or hand-held computer. And even if the signal is too weak for a laptop to connect to, it can still get the ID, which it then compares to Skyhook's database and plots on a map.

Morgan says that Skyhook's software can figure out where it is -- even if it's beneath the Prudential Center on the Mass. Pike. ''We get readings," he says. ''GPS doesn't." But when I asked him how Skyhook does in the deeper Big Dig tunnels, which aren't penetrated by light, cellphone signal, or drivers with aquaphobia, Morgan admitted, ''There are some dead spots there. But we go a lot further than other technologies." In New York, he says that Skyhook drivers picked up WiFi signal in the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel, beneath the Hudson River. A new Starbucks outlet, perhaps? ''We're not sure where it's coming from," he says.

There are lots of skeptics of Skyhook's idea, which Morgan freely admits won't work well in rural areas, where there are fewer WiFi networks, and where networks don't often overlap.

''It seems like a lot of effort to keep the database of WiFi access points up-to-date," says Michael Maggio, chief executive of Newbury Networks, a Boston company that makes WiFi security software. ''What happens when people move from one apartment to another, and take their access points with them? GPS satellites stay in the same place, but access points can move."

Skyhook has been around for a long time without announcing a pilot test, or a first paying customer, or a big fund-raising round. (By contrast, another start-up, Framingham-based uLocate, is working with MapQuest and Nextel to enable GPS-equipped cellphones to figure out things like which restaurants are nearby, and has raised $5.5 million in venture capital.) Being in a hot sector is important, but so is perceived momentum.

And Skyhook hasn't honed in on a particular application where its WiFi way-finding technology will be most effective. Morgan envisions it being used by fleets of drivers and deliverymen to augment GPS information when they're in the city. But he also thinks it could deliver advertising based on a user's location.

Shikhar Ghosh, the company's chairman, imagines a ''Lojack for laptops" system, where a stolen laptop could be tracked down -- as long as the thief stayed close to WiFi networks (and didn't know how to uninstall the Skyhook software). Ghosh also talks about a new generation of telephones that would use WiFi networks to make and receive calls using voice-over-IP technology. He thinks Skyhook could help manufacturers comply with the FCC's demand that all mobile phones be able to transmit their location to 911 systems.

The recent installment of Ghosh as Skyhook's chairman is a good sign, though. Morgan worked for him at Open Market, the Cambridge e-commerce company that brought some of the first shopping carts to the Web. Ghosh helped Skyhook raise just over $1 million this year; he says a bigger infusion of venture capital isn't necessary right now.

Eventually, predicts Alan Phillips, the chief executive of Ulocate, our portable devices will have several techniques for helping us get oriented: They'll talk to GPS satellites, cellphone towers, and WiFi networks. ''These devices will have smart agents that interpret the value of each source," he says. ''Which data should they throw out because it makes no sense?"

Skyhook's founders know they want to be part of that future. They just need to figure out how to get there.

Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com