LastMile opens U.S. office

U.K. location-based services developer LastMile Communications is expanding overseas, announcing today it is opening up a U.S. sales and operations office in Raleigh, N.C.

The privately held company has been operating in Exeter, U.K., since 1999 developing a pico cell architecture and information management technology designed to overlay the standard grid of lampposts found in any city. The technology not only provides access to the Internet for mobile subscribers, each lamppost site can store up to 4 GB of cached information, which LastMile uses for business and navigation data unique to each cell site. Basically the network doesn’t have to determine the location of the user, since all local information is stored in the cell site the user is accessing.

LastMile has already entered into a strategic partnership with European science and technology research company QinetiQ, which is now trying to commercialize LastMile’s technology. The U.S. subsidiary, LastMile USA, will focus on developing similar strategic partnerships and recruiting customers on this side of the Atlantic. The office will be headed by Skip Ballou, Last Mile’s president of the Americas and Asia-Pacific.