SAN FRANCISCO - In the geek equivalent of a Super Bowl ad, Skyhook Wireless got a shoutout at the Macworld expo last week, putting the Boston technology firm in the same company as tech giants like Intel Corp. and Google Inc.
Apple Inc.'s chief executive, Steve Jobs, revealed in his keynote speech that Skyhook helps power a new location-awareness feature that's available on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows the sleek devices to home in on their current location using WiFi technology.
"There's no GPS inside the phone . . . how do we actually arrive at the location?" Jobs said, demonstrating the location-finding ability on an iPhone by plotting a route from the convention center to the nearest Apple store - without having to type in his starting point.
"We're working with two companies to do that: Google, and a company called Skyhook Wireless . . . we're using both of them, and it works pretty doggone well," he said.
Skyhook's technology uses signals from WiFi hot spots to triangulate and find a person's location, instead of using a chip that lets a mobile device communicate with the satellite-based Global Positioning System.
Skyhook, founded in 2003 by Ted Morgan and Michael Shean, has gathered and catalogued the WiFi fingerprint of streets in thousands of US cities and towns by driving along roads and collecting the unique signatures of 23 million WiFi signals that flow out of houses, businesses, and public access points. The company uses that data to let WiFi-enabled devices know where they are.
Five years ago, Morgan and Shean, were traveling for a tech company called edocs Inc. "We were just amazed at the sheer number of WiFi signals available wherever we went," Morgan said. "We started exploring how can we take advantage of the fact there are WiFi signals in the air at all times."
They developed the technology using the fact that each router has a unique identifier - essentially a beacon that can be picked up by any WiFi-enabled device. Over the years, the company has raised $17 million in funding, and today Skyhook's technology works in about 8,000 US cities and towns. The company is looking to expand its database by mapping WiFi signals in Europe and Asia.
Morgan is the company's chief executive, and Shean is vice president for business development.
The software upgrade that includes the new location feature - it's available free on an iPhone and for $19.99 on an iPod Touch - allows people to simply press a button to see where they are.
A map displays a bull's-eye that's centered on the user's location; Morgan said Skyhook's technology typically is accurate up to about 165 feet. The technology builds in the likely margin of error and draws a circle on the map, taking into account the likely error of the location technology, so that the user will be within the radius 95 percent of the time.
"In mobile [telecommunications] the value becomes very self-evident, because it's very painful to do the things people do on the desktop. Long query strings are painful in the mobile context - even on the iPhone," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.
Early users on Mac bulletin boards and an online discussion community of location-based enthusiasts called Geowanking showed varied results, with some people reporting dead-on accuracy with the location technology and others complaining that the crosshairs were way off. One user found that in Manhattan, the location technology was less than 33 feet off, but on a suburban college campus the crosshairs put him on the other side of the Hudson River, 2.5 miles away.
Skyhook's technology has been deployed in various forms over the years. The company developed Loki, a location-finding application for laptops. A plug-in to AOL Instant Messenger allows people to tie their online chats to their current location. The iRiver, a WiFi-enabled MP3 player that has not yet hit the market, also uses Skyhook's technology. Last year, the GPS chip maker SiRF said it would use Skyhook technology to power its hybrid WiFi and GPS platform.
But the deal with Apple, whose terms were not disclosed, represents a significant change for Skyhook, since the technology is now deployed in a device that is inherently portable and already in the hands of four million people since it was launched in June.
"I think we'll see more and more of these devices, like the iPod touch, PDAs with WiFi, MP3 players, and cameras," said Ina Sebastian, associate analyst at JupiterResearch. "These are definitely portable devices you can use outside on the street. With laptops, you kind of have to sit down and boot up your applications; with the iPod Touch it's pretty useful if you're walking down the street and want to check out a local business."
In the future, Morgan said, the technology that started out bootstrapped by maxed-out credit cards and second mortgages will probably complement GPS. The two technologies work in different environments and at different speeds.
"What consumers want," Morgan said, "is for the location to work and not to have to worry if they're outside or near buildings. The idea is to combine all these technologies so a user gets an instant fix on where they are. This is certainly a great validation."
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.
