Add Your Wireless Node To Expand Skyhook Wireless
April 18, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Castle, OSX, Puter Stuff, Travel, iPhone
Update: See the cool screen shot I took from my iPhone, using Capture. The pin represents the coordinates given by LocateMe to Maps. And the blue circle is the best Skyhook could do. Good thing I wasn’t really lost. At the time of the shot I was traveling north on the Guide at about 60 mph. Locate was a few blocks off to the west, but not too bad.
For those of us with iPhones and no GPS I tend to use the iPhone Maps built-in “Find Me” feature quite a bit. Although in some areas, especially north Whatcom County, it’s positioning is rather weak, usually providing a giant 10 mile radius that I might not even be in. Here’s a map of their coverage area.
I ended up installing an app called LocateMe on my iPhone which attempts to triangulate based solely upon cell towers. I can then hit the “Map It” button to have it load the longitude and latitude in Maps. This is usually closer, but provides only a specific map point and not an area.
As most iPhone users may know, Apple partnered with Skyhook Wireless for this positioning information which uses a combination of cell tower and mapped wireless access points (AP) to return results. Well now it appears you can submit your wireless access point for acceptance into their database.
I just submitted mine and received an automated reply.
Thank you for submitting a Wireless Access Point to Skyhook Wireless. The following information has been received and will be processed shortly:
MAC Address:
…blah….
Lat/Lon:blah, -blahIt can take up to a few weeks before you see your Access Point in some of our production systems. In the mean time you can download Loki to start using Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System on your laptop or desktop. Go to http://loki.com/download to start using Loki today.
Happy Mapping!
The Skyhook Team
I downloaded the Loki extension into Flock and after asking for permission to find my location it came up with nada. Instead asking me to enter my address, which it then displayed on a Google Map. That was big help.
Loki has a few demos and an API, none of the demos worked for me, but there was an embedded chat widget to speak with support. See screenshot. They never responded. So I’m uninstalling the Loki extension.
However, adding your wireless access points to their database will still help me out so have at it.
