Skyhook gives power to the people

Article: http://www.intomobile.com/2008/01/22/help-skyhook-map-wifi-hotspots-make-iphone-google-maps-my-location-more-accurate.html

Last week I did a journal entry based on Skyhook Wireless’ Wi-Fi-based navigation for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This week, I found another article pertaining to the same topic, but this article brings up a new discussion. Now, people now have the opportunity to help Skyhook add hotspots to their database by submitting their own data.

As I brought up before in my last article about Skyhook, Wi-Fi navigation is not as reliable as GPS navigation because it only works if you are located near a hotspot that is in the company’s database. While the company has mapped 70% of the country’s hotspots, that still leaves a lot of areas out of the loop. I experimented with the navigation feature on the iPod Touch that is on display at the Best Buy I work at. When I clicked the button to find my location, it found Best Buy’s hotspot right away…but when I tried getting directions from Best Buy to several different locations, including ODU, it came up with nothing. Obviously, the Hampton Roads area has not been sufficiently mapped. This is where the users come in – we can now send our own hotspot information to Skyhook so they can add it to their database, which in turn makes the service more accurate and usable.

It takes a little time to gather the information they need. You have to find the MAC address of your wireless access point, and you have to find the latitude and longitude of the street address where the access point is located. This requires a little tweaking in Google Maps.

As it stands now, you pretty much have to live in a big city like New York or Boston to get ideal use out of the Wi-Fi navigation feature. So this plan sounds like a great idea to make Wi-Fi navigation more accurate and useful to everybody. But it brings up the question of data integrity…if just anyone can submit hotspot data to the database, couldn’t they send false information? If many people sent incorrect data, the navigation service would be rendered useless. Hopefully Skyhook will not just blindly accept submissions. But on the other hand, I highly doubt they’ll be able to verify all submissions either. I’m curious to see how long this idea will carry on and how successful it will be.