MWC: TI to use Skyhook Wi-Fi in location chips

Texas Instruments today announced it would integrate Skyhook Wireless’ Wi-Fi location technology into its wireless chipsets. Skyhook’s XPS software will enable hybrid-positioning capabilities on TI’s NaviLink 6.0 and WiLink 6.0 technology, as well as future platforms. Skyhook XPS provides accurate location by combining its own comprehensive database of the physical locations of Wi-Fi access throughout the United States and Europe with raw GPS readings and cell-tower triangulation to accurately and quickly determine location.

The company also announced today that this database now includes 100 million Wi-Fi access points and more than 400,000 cell-tower locations, bringing its network coverage to 500 devices in 32 countries. Skyhook said its hybrid system built on top of that data can support 1,000 location-based applications across 50 million devices and now generates more than 100 million location requests per day. 15 billion location queries occurred during 2008 alone.

Essentially, any Wi-Fi enabled device equipped with XPS can scan for these Wi-Fi access points, either public or private, to obtain a location from the Skyhook database. Even in deep urban settings, where assisted-GPS only produces an accurate location 70% of the time, XPS can improve the accuracy by at least 35% even if only a single access point is available.

Qualcomm announced support for Skyhook in November. The chipset vendor makes assisted-GPS available in the majority of its CDMA and W-CDMA chipsets. The month prior, Broadcom also signed a licensing deal with Skyhook to use XPS in its location-based services portfolio. Founder and CEO Ted Morgan said the major chipset players will all be pitching Skyhook to device makers across the world, not just for smartphones, but also for netbooks and media players. As location technology creeps into all mobile apps and services, the use cases are also expanding from pure navigation to local search, games and social networking.

“A lot of the new opportunities are on netbooks here,” Morgan said. “They expect people to use them in most mobile environments either for navigation or general social networking. A lot will have cellular cards so they are always connected, and GPS suppliers are looking ahead to add GPS to all of them.”

Not all devices have both Wi-Fi and GPS radios embedded yet, but the market is rapidly expanding, Morgan added. “It’s not all consolidated yet, but the chip suppliers believe in it so much they are building combo chips that have GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth all built into one chip. That is why Qualcomm, Broadcom and TI have done so well in the last few years.”