After I heard that Skyhook Wireless was announcing a deal that would put its geolocation technology into a line of Dell Netbooks, I talked with the company's CEO, Ted Morgan. I'd last talked to Morgan three years ago when he pitched me on the merits of Wi-Fi over traditional satellite GPS location-finding technologies. Ironically, the Dell deal puts Skyhook technology only in those Netbooks ordered with the optional GPS hardware in them, even though all Netbooks have Wi-Fi. But as Morgan described it to me, the best real-world solution for geolocation today is a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi.
Below, more observations on location technologies from the CEO of Skyhook.
With more devices getting GPS satellite radios, isn't Skyhook's Wi-Fi-based business in danger? When I asked Morgan about this, he said, in fact, that it's the opposite. Wi-Fi, he says, is the critical geolocaton technology for devices like the iPhone. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the time, he says, when the iPhone locates itself, it's doing so using the Skyhook Wi-Fi geolocation software built in to the phone, and not GPS.
There are several challenges with GPS, according to Morgan. As most everyone knows, it doesn't work indoors. It's also slow, even when it does work. "Time to fix" for a device that's been powered off is 30 seconds at best, and for instant-on, quick-grab apps like you have on a smartphone or Netbook, that's just too slow. Furthermore, the bigger the screen of a device, the worse the GPS reception gets. Morgan says, "The bigger screens drown out the GPS signals." Although when I pressed him as to why, and he claimed to not be technical enough to fully understand it. Dedicated GPS devices, like dash-top navigators, also have antenna devoted to GPS, but phones in particular give priority to telephone communications and short-change their GPS antenna designs.
Of course, when you're out of Wi-Fi range or moving fast (driving), or have a device that is continuously powered-up, GPS works well. That's what it was designed for. But in many other use cases, you can't get a good fix with GPS technology.
How do you maintain a geo-database of Wi-Fi hot spots, especially when more and more of them are now behind security passwords? As before, Morgan says, Skyhook employees and contractors "wardrive" down millions of miles of roads to correlate location (from GPS) with the signatures of Wi-Fi access points. Morgan said that Wi-Fi beacons are unique even when security is turned on, so that's not a factor.
Another way that Skyhook keeps its data current is by using the information it gleans from Skyhook users. That's right: When your iPhone geolocates itself it also sends Wi-Fi beacon data back to Skyhook, which helps keep the system's location database current.
Dell Netbooks with Skyhook software will tell what's going on around you (but so will any geo-aware browser, like Firefox 3.5).
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)So Wi-Fi and GPS are complementary? Yes, Morgan says. A lot of the current geolocation systems are "hybrid." He says Skyhook has "tons of patents" based on blending data from Wi-Fi, GPS, and cell tower signals to determine location. For example, he says that Skyhook can use data from only two GPS satellites (traditional GPS-only systems need contact with four) to geolocate, if the device is also able to correlate with nearby Wi-Fi signals.
Why so expensive? I repeated my complaint to Morgan about the ridiculous $9.99 a month price that AT&T was charging for turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone now, and he agreed that it was too high. "The thing to watch is what TomTom prices at," he said, when it comes out with its turn-by-turn iPhone software. Morgan agreed that GPS services are priced too high right now, but he says it's because the mapping companies are charging developers and manufacturers too much for their data. TomTom, he says, could break the price barrier if it releases a fairly priced iPhone navigation app.
Regarding Firefox, which uses Google's geolocation technology, not Skyhook's. Mozilla built Skyhook technology into earlier builds of Firefox 3.5, but it eventually shifted to Google's location-finding technology. Morgan says, "It was a bummer for us, but it's really too bad for Firefox users since it's not as good." He sees Firefox as being strongly attached to Google, so it wasn't a surprising move. And, he says, at least the browsers are all zeroing in on the same standard for communicating location data, even if their underlying geolocating technologies may vary.
When are we going to get geolocation as a standard feature in cameras? Skyhook put Wi-Fi geolocation in an EyeFi card, but the technology hasn't made it into more than a few experimental camera models yet. "The camera guys have the longest product cycles," Morgan says." They're like the old automakers." Also, he says the power drain of Wi-Fi and the time-to-fix issues make it hard to get accurate location data and attach it to photos. He speculates that maybe in 2010 we'll see more location-award digital cameras.
Do we need location clearinghouses, like Yahoo Fire Eagle and Google Latitude? Morgan thinks it's too early, and that the search companies are not the right ones to push these services. "There has to be multiple places you want to send your data before you need a gateway, and these guys built the gateways first." And he said he'd look rather to Apple, Nokia, and RIM to make these services work. "If you own the device," Morgan says, "you own the user."
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Livio)
The new Livio Radio certainly isn't the first Wi-Fi radio to feature Pandora access--the Squeezebox Boom and the Grace GDI-IR2000 both offer the functionality--but it's certainly the first model seemingly designed around the streaming Internet music service.
With a standard tabletop radio design, the Livio gives you full access to Pandora, and also makes it easy to interact with the service by putting "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons on the front panel and the remote. The Livio can connect to your home network using either the integrated Wi-Fi or the Ethernet port around back. In addition to Pandora, the Livio Radio also features the ability to tune into more than 11,000 standard Internet radio stations. We're also happy to spot an auxiliary input on the back, making it easy to plug in an iPod in a pinch. We also can't complain about the price, a reasonable $150, but we're reserve our final judgment until we actually get to listen to it.
On Sale Now: $149.99 - $159.99
View the latest prices for Livio Radio
Skype 2.8 for Mac will ship on Tuesday, with new features including screen sharing and an integrated Wi-Fi hot spot connector.
Available only for Mac OS X at first, the new version will add screen-sharing capabilities to the app's voice, video, and chat communications features. Skype spokespeople told me that users will be able to run all four channels at once with acceptable performance.
Screen sharing is useful in business settings (I get a lot of demos over apps like Webex, for example), but it has personal applications as well: People could share photographs, and presumably videos as well, using the feature.
Skype is also getting a feature that will allow users to access WiFi hotspots on the Boingo network for 19 cents a minute. The funds will be deducted from users' Skype accounts. Boingo has about 85,000 hot spots worldwide, a Boingo rep told me. TMobile, the primary Wi-Fi provider at U.S. airports, is on the Boingo network.
The Wi-Fi access feature makes Skype a more useful product for people who use the VoIP app from their Mac laptops, and the per-minute payment scheme makes sense for highly mobile users for whom buying access by the hour or month would leave a lot of unused credits behind.
Skype co-founder Nicklas Zennstrom also started a Wi-Fi network called Fon, but Skype 2.8 doesn't yet integrate with that system.
Disruptive Telephony covered other new features in Skype 2.8, including a new way to update your Skype "mood" and to follow users in a Twitter-like fashion, bigger Avatar images, and a new way to manage and prioritize chat windows.
Also, regarding Boingo: That company announced a new Apple product: A connector app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For $7.95 a month, users of those devices can access the entire Boingo Wi-Fi network. For U.S.-based iPhone users on the AT&T network, this is not such a great product since AT&T-provided Wi-Fi is now free for them, but international users and travelers, and iPod Touch users (perhaps those who use TruPhone for VOIP calls) may find it a good deal.
It seems like a natural fit: Evernote, a Web service that turns random pictures of information into a searchable database and Eye-Fi, a company whose SD cards enable you to turn random information into pictures and upload them to the Web. In theory, it's a great idea. Evernote, which requires input ubiquity to be really useful, gains another data stream, and Eye-Fi gains a relatively compelling productivity application.
Eye-Fi Share
Having used both Evernote and an Eye-Fi card, however, I suspect a bit less than that rosy scenario. With Eye-Fi you predetermine the various places you want to send your photos--to your laptop, to a sharing site, and so on--via the Web site. Evernote will be added to this configuration process as a target for photos--all of your photos. There are no controls with the Eye- Fi card to send select photos to a particular location, just a global enabling and disabling of locations via the Web site. That's OK, sort of, when you're uploading to a photo-sharing service or sending them to your computer, but the stuff you'll want to send to Evernote is a more intermittent and selective stream. And you can already send to Evernote selectively from a variety of phones, though in many cases not as transparently. Still, there are some situations where I think the pair could greatly complement each other, such as for house or apartment hunting, documenting accidents, or assets for insurance purposes. What do you think?
No more SMS two-step.
"They wrote this for you," Josh said in IM to me about Devicescape's Easy Wi-Fi for AT&T, an app that directly addresses my complaints about the free Wi-Fi that AT&T now provides to iPhone users at Starbucks and various airports.
As I wrote, I dislike the Safari/SMS two-step required to authorize the iPhone to use the AT&T free Wi-Fi. Yes, it's looking a gift horse in the mouth. But I am a professional crank. I really do get paid for this.
Anyway, the Easy Wi-Fi app bypasses the SMS process with a single button. You do have to pre-load the app with your phone number. But only once. And you also have to connect to the AT&T access point through the iPhone's control panel first, but once you've done that, you just press the big Log In button and you're connected.
I tried this app at a Starbucks. I downloaded the app over my phone's cellular connection, put in my phone number (both things I'll never have to do again), connected to the store's Wi-Fi router, fired up the Easy Wi-Fi, pressed Log In, and I was connected. Much better than the old way. Thank you, Devicescape.
Easy Wi-Fi is free through Friday. Then it goes up to $1.99. So grab it now (iTunes link).
First spotted: Gizmodo.
Hoop jumpage. Totally hot.
I finally got the SMS alert on my iPhone telling me that I now have access to the Wi-Fi hot spots at Starbucks, for free. Cool. But the images I had of just sauntering in to a Starbucks, selecting the local Wi-Fi network and jumping on the Internet were busted when I read these ridiculous instructions for getting access:
- Activate Wi-Fi from the settings icon on your iPhone.
- Select "attwifi" from the list of available networks.
- Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap 'continue.'
- You will receive a text message from AT&T with a secure link to the AT&T Wi-Fi hot spot. You will not be charged for the text message.
- The SMS link will only be valid for 24 hours at the location it was requested. Another request must be submitted when using another hot spot location.
- Open the text message and tap on the link for 24-hour access to the AT&T Wi-Fi hot spot.
To get on Wi-Fi, I need to tell you my phone number and then authorize over SMS? That's just goofy. I get that the method that I think should work to authorize an iPhone on the network--a check of the phone's MAC address by the AT&T Wi-Fi authorization system--might be more hackable than this closed-loop authorization system that checks to see if you're an AT&T iPhone subscriber in good standing via your phone number. But so what? It's not like the value of the network connection that someone would be appropriating if they hacked this system is that high to begin with.
Adding this "hoop jumpage" (as our writer Stephen Shankland calls it) just punishes the rest of us who only want to do a quick check of a Web site or map, thank you very much. It appears that for anything less than a long Web browsing session, we'd be better off just living with the cellular data coming into our phones.
See also: Meraki is offering free Wi-Fi to San Francisco. Why?
Skyhook Wireless announced Monday that it is integrating GPS into its geolocation service to get an even more accurate fix for location-based services.
Up until now, Skyhook's geolocation service, which is used on Apple's iPhone, among other services and devices, has used Wi-Fi hot spots to get a fix on location. The service works very well in densely populated areas where there are a lot of Wi-Fi radios transmitting signals. And it's great for locating places indoors or in cities with a lot of tall buildings, all places where satellite-based GPS, or Global Positioning System, technology has difficulty getting a location fix.
But for all of the benefits of Wi-Fi, it doesn't work in rural areas where hot spots are few and far between. This is where the GPS technology comes in.
"Our technology works great in populated areas," said Ted Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Skyhook. "But on the open road it's more difficult. Now with GPS integrated, iPhone users, for example, can get turn-by-turn navigation anywhere they go."
The way the Skyhook service originally worked is that it would triangulate and get a fix on location-based data on known Wi-Fi hot spots. The company has a database of where Wi-Fi hot spots all over the country are located. Specifically, it uses the Mac address, a unique identifier that every piece of hardware on the Internet must have, to identify the router, and it matches that identifier with the location. Using multiple signals in the same geographic location, the Skyhook technology is able to pinpoint a location.
Now Skyhook has integrated GPS into its technology, which it is putting in chipsets that go into mobile phones and other devices that also have GPS recievers. GPS will allow Skyhook to cover more ground with its geolocation technology. The Wi-Fi/GPS technology should also help services that used GPS only to get information about location more quickly. Because GPS uses three or four low-orbiting satellites to pinpoint a location, it can take a few seconds before it's able to calculate a location. Skyhook's Wi-Fi technology can get location information much faster.
So where might we see this new technology? The original Wi-Fi-based Skyhook technology is already on the iPhone. Morgan couldn't say for sure that the new "hybrid" Wi-Fi/GPS technology will be used on the iPhone 3G that comes out next week. But one of the upgrades in the new iPhone 3G is the addition of a GPS chip, so it would make sense that the Skyhook technology would be used on it. Morgan did say that Apple has access to all of its technology.
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Thumbs Up)
It's been noted many times that digital photo frames--among the most overproduced items in the gadget world--are perennially searching for new ways to differentiate themselves from the ever-growing pack. Some have included Webcams, combined with land lines to provide photo IDs, or have doubled as secondary computer displays.
eStarling, for its part, has taken a different tack: Rather than contantly updating its hardware, it adds new feeds to its 8-inch Wi-Fi frame. Already able to get streams from online photo services such as Flickr or Photobucket, the wireless frame has now added Facebook to its networked family.
Once hooked up to your Facebook account, it will automatically display photos uploaded to the social network, GeekAlerts says. Which means that you probably want to be careful where you place the frame when mom and dad come over.
There is no business model behind it, but mesh Wi-Fi company Meraki is offering free Wi-Fi access to San Francisco, one neighborhood at a time, as I discovered when I passed by the company's folksy demo table at my local farmers' market last month (see report from local newspaper). But Meraki is not in the business of just blasting money out the door, which it appears to be doing in San Francisco, and there is a method to this program.
Meraki's business is actually quite straightforward: it sells wide-area Wi-Fi network hardware, and provides the management consoles to go with it. If you want to give a building, a street, a town, or a city access to Wi-Fi, you buy some Meraki Wi-Fi boxes, plug a few of them in to broadband connections, and they configure themselves to wirelessly share the connection among each other and among users.
Stick this free gizmo in your window in San Francisco to boost the Meraki signal, for yourself and others.
(Credit: Meraki)Unlike other creative Wi-Fi mesh companies Fon and Whisher, Meraki is not aiming to build a global free Wi-Fi network. Rather, it's simply a Wi-Fi hardware company. If you run a mall and want to provide Wi-Fi access to everyone in it, get Meraki equipment (or spend more for competing products from Cisco, Tropos, Skypilot, or Nortel). If you want to change the world by connecting existing broadband connections together into a giant mesh that anyone can use for free (and break ISP terms of service in the process), sign up for Fon.
That's not to say that Meraki isn't out to change the world. Its technology of relatively inexpensive Wi-Fi access points coupled with its hosted management console can make it cost-effective for a community to light up wireless access for everyone. It's like the OLPC of Wifi (and to be clear, OLPC devices have their own mesh Wi-Fi routers built in).
User access to Meraki services can be free or paid. Meraki has the software for both, and doesn't really care how its devices are configured, since it's basically a hardware company. The hardware costs $150 for an indoor repeater and $250 for an outdoor-hardened router. You can also set up an ad-supported Meraki network, and get a discount on hardware.
Meraki co-founder Sanjit Biswas told me that one hardwire connection can be distributed to about 10 repeaters, and that each repeater can handle about 10 users at a time. And, of course, Meraki networks can multiplex multiple broadband connections together and share all their bandwidth with all their users. Most users will get about 2 megabytes a second of throughput.
Free Meraki nodes in San Francisco.
Which brings us back to San Francisco and the loss-leader network it's building here. San Francisco is Meraki's test kitchen. If you're in one of the covered neighborhoods, you can just hop on the network for free. If you can see the signal but want a stronger connection in your house, the company will send you a repeater you can set up in a window (thereby expanding the network's footprint). If you're in an expansion area for the San Francisco project but have no signal, you might be able to get Meraki to bolt an outdoor repeater on to your house; the company may connect it to a DSL connection that it installs and pays for (you'll only have access to the Meraki signal, though, not the raw DSL link). Coming soon will be solar-powered repeaters, which will make Meraki's build-out even easier.
Another thing Meraki is testing in San Francisco is how to work with municipalities. Meraki may just provide San Francisco the city-wide free Wi-Fi access that the mayor, Google, and EarthLink together couldn't maneuver into being. But this project is a one-off. Biswas says Meraki does not want to be the primary driver of a muni Wi-Fi project. Rather, the company will sell its technology to whatever agency or company wants to sponsor the installation. Arguing the politics of public versus private wide-area Wi-Fi is not what a hardware provider needs to do. It wins no matter which way the wind blows.
Not every social networking concept strikes gold, even when the coalescing factor is the common interest of finding a good Internet cafe. In the case of WeFi, a hot-spot-finding application with a social community tacked on, various CNET editors have raised a collective eyebrow at some of the more intense methods of attaining human connection, but largely agree that being able to chat with verified friends or nearby Internet surfers adds a useful dimension to the search for reliable Wi-Fi access in comfortable coffee shops.
This First Look at WeFi for Windows laptops and WeFi for Pocket PC tours WeFi's easy-to-use interface and automated hot-spot-sniffers from two Internet-thirsty devices.
