Kippster: Location, location, loki: "Location based services continue to garner interest among users, businesses, search engines, advertisers and entrepreneurs. I've been fortunate enough to have worked closely with a company that just got included in Gartner's 'Cool Vendors in Mobile and Wireless, 2006' publication (ID Number: G00138458). I can't actually post the info or I'd get strung up, but it is cool!

The problem? It's hard to give location information if you don't know (more specifically, if your computing device doesn't know) where you are. The more precise the location, the better services are able to provide location specific information back to you/your computing device. We're all familiar with GPS, and some are likely familiar with Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD) and Assisted GPS (A-GPS), but Skyhook has attaked the problem by using the ever growing infrastructure that is created by the wifi networks.

Rather than relying on satellites for positioning, the system utilizes wifi access points to provide location information. All that is needed is a lightweight client and a device that supports wifi (and in general, a connection to the Internet -- although this is not strictly required it sorta makes sense).

Wireless Positioning Service (WPS) is not a cure all, clearly it needs a certain density of wireless access points in order to do its job accurately. This, as of now, relegates the service to urban (and indoor) settings in which wifi radio waves are bouncing all over the place. Interestingly, this is also where GPS sometimes has a harder time. It's also handy in that no additional hardware is necessary, if you have a wifi interface, you can use the service.

They recently went Beta with a browser toolbar (pretty soon, there "