It was 6:30 on Sunday morning, August 9th, 2007 when Ted Morgan, the Boston based CEO of a little location technology start-up called Skyhook Wireless, got a totally unexpected call from an absolute stranger in California.

Who calls a complete stranger at 6:30 am on a Sunday morning – especially from California, where it was 3:30 am?

Only one man, of course. Steve Jobs. And Jobs was calling Morgan to license Skyhook’s technology for his new iPhone. The rest of the successful relationship between Apple and Skyhook, of course, is history – but it’s been captured for posterity in a Harvard Business School case study used by faculty to teach entrepreneurial students how to manage this kind of out-of-the-blue opportunity. Every entering student at Harvard Business School is taught the Skyhook case. But only one or two may be lucky enough to have a similarly magical experience with their start-up.

Morgan and Skyhook are also in the news for quite different reasons. After originally working with Google to provide Skyhook technology for the Android platform, Morgan claims that Google put pressure on Motorola and Samsung which “forced” them to choose Google’s own in-house location technology over Skyhook’s. So Skyhook is now involved in a lawsuit against Google’s supposedly anti-competitive behavior and Morgan told me his side of the story when he came into our San Francisco studio. Given today’s identification of the Google data engineer behind the company’s controversial Street View project, this interview with Morgan, who is one of Google’s most persistent critics on the data and location fronts, is particularly timely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Based on a batch of documents released in the Skyhook/Google lawsuit, it seems that Google’s Andy Rubin is not only the boss of Android, but the boss of just about everyone in the Android ecosystem. Freshly unsealed court docs reveal that Google is using Android’s compatibility standards to bully OEMs into choosing Google products for their smartphones.

Basically, anytime a manufacturer wants Android — or at least, Android with all of its best perks, like the Android Market or Google’s ultra slick Gmail client — on its smartphone, the device must adhere to a compatibility standard, which is determined solely by Google. In an email dated August 6, 2010, Dan Morrill, a manager in the Android group, mentioned that it’s pretty obvious to phone manufacturers that “we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want.”

Read more…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Running a marathon is hard. I should know, I’ve never even considered running one. But a lot of people do. And a lot of people like the idea of going to watch others run marathons. I have no idea why, but they do — I’ve seen it on TV. Anyway, if you have any interest in tracking a marathon, Skyhook Wireless has a pretty cool way of doing it.

The San Francisco Marathon is this coming Sunday. To coincide with it, Skyhook Wireless has set up a new “Skyhook Experience” to track the event. On their page, you’ll be able to see geotagged tweets, Flickr photos, and Foursquare check-ins all around the event in realtime. You’ll also be able to go back in time (with a slider) to watch all of the aforementioned data evolve.

The idea is similar to the Vicarious.ly site SimpleGeo set up for SXSW. Like SimpleGeo, Skyhook is doing this to showcase their data. On the map you can not only see (and click on) individual data points, but you can see heat maps of particularly hot areas of geo data.

“On Race Day Sunday you’ll see hotspots activity – an actual application of geodata to a live event. And with the social context on top of location, we show a unique kind of view to what’s actually happening on the ground,” Skyhook’s VP of Marketing, Kate Imbach says.

She notes that they also did something similar for Country Music Festival in Nashville in June. “Turns out they love the crap out of their Keith Urban — the activity went off the charts the second he took the stage,” she humorously remarks. You can see that data here.

These data showcases do offer up a kind of neat visual way to follow events remotely. And this one saves you the hassle of running 26 miles.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch