Jed Rice of Skyhook Wirless on Location Accuracy and Coverage

Smartspace interviewed Jed Rice, VP and Market Development at Skyhook Wireless. Jed evangelizes, the adoption and acceptance of Wi-Fi positioning. He presents his view on the key principals to make locative services are going to become a reality:

One, build on top of technology platforms that deliver a user’s location to within 20-50 meters 90%+ of the time. There is nothing worse to a user than being put in the middle of a river or lake. Two, develop applications that appeal to a broad user base (Note: Skyhook now provides an API to developers). [...]. Three, develop applications and services that operate on the most number of devices as possible [...]. Finally, develop applications that can – to the greatest extent possible – operate independently of third party constraints (e.g. buying additional hardware, requiring third party distribution/permission from entities like carriers) [...].

Relation to my thesis: I am particularly interested at Skyhook’s aim at creating consistent and accurate location information (principal #1) to support location-aware application. They advertise coverage in term % of time and not % of an area then talk about user’s need of location accuracy of 20-50 meters. Very relevant for their business targeting urban lifestyle (related to Indoors 95.5% of the Time). However, generating consistent and accurate location information might be more complicated than promoting coverage and accuracy values. Providers of location information could present their offer according to the location aware application developers and designers requirements:

• When is location information necessary
• Where is location information necessary
• What type of location information does the task necessitate according to the when, where (e.g. quality, timeliness, granularity, absolute, relative, relevance, confidence, and map,)

I am also interested in the way Skyhook represent the data that come from a muli-modal location-determination. How to support the differences in quality and timeliness of location predicted by several source.