My goodness but it's been a long time since i made it out here. I'll blame it on the work...and with good reason.
We've been pretty much heads down for the last several months preparing for what came out last week. As most of you who read this already know (since I've been crowing about it for the last week) --
Apple announced the inclusion of Skyhook's Wireless Positioning Service in the upgrade of the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Steve Jobs announced this during his keynote at Macworld in San Francisco last week.
USA Today
Video podcast
Boston Globe
Links to pr and keynote
Some photos
among others....the best is to see Steve on stage explaining it -- "Isn't that cool? ... That's really cool!"
So, we're happy to be included in the iPhone, a pretty fantastic phone/computing device. It really does change the way you think about the device -- or at least it has for me. Phone seems like such a limiting term...
Well, that's the big news. A number of other things have been going on that are worth mentioning:
- patent 7,305,245 "Location-based services that choose location algorithms based on number of detected access points within range of user device " was issued and includes me as an inventor
- we continue to hire some excellent people into the team (and we're looking for more!)
- the prospects look good for adding WPS into other devices
Personally, I'd like to be able to spend some time focusing on continuing to improve the system for indoor use. There is a lot of research that has been done on indoor positioning systems that we can leverage in considering a large scale indoor positioning system. It has some great challenges that make it hard, but extremely interesting. Not to say that outdoor positioning doesn't also have some great problems as well, but the game changes a bit when you move indoor.
Not a bad start to the year!
Kipp
