Local Faves 1.1 is now available for download: https://www.skyhookwireless.com/localfaves/register/index.php.

New features and updates in this release include:

• Profile Page now shows own activity
• Ability to check-in with Foursquare when associating a venue with a fave
• Ability to create new venues (perfect for users in more rural areas)
• Ability to specify a custom username when not signed into Facebook  (prevents “anonymous” tags within your app).
• Better heatmap generation
• Better performance in large map areas
• More delegate callbacks
• Twitter component now using Oauth
• Numerous minor fixes and UI tweaks

Although the previous release of Local Faves will still work, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to 1.1. Twitter will completely drop Basic Authentication support by August 16th, so any Local Faves apps should be upgraded by then.

Many of these updates were based on feedback we received from users like you, so please continue to send us your ideas and feature requests.

Also, just a reminder that Skyhook’s Local Faves User Group can be found here.  You can ask/answer questions with other users, share ideas on how to use Local Faves in your apps and interact directly with our engineers.

For those of you who have launched apps using Local Faves, be sure to let us know when your apps are live in the App Store so we can help promote them and include you in media opportunities (some of our Local Faves users have been featured in articles in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Mashable).  Press coverage can directly impact download numbers, so please let us know when you are live!

We hope you enjoy the new features.

Skyhook, UDig, and the Country Music Association have collaborated to create a real-time map of geotagged mobile activity around the 2010 CMA Music Festival in Nashville from June 10 - 13.

The map will use Skyhook’s new data intelligence service SpotRank, which identifies the density of people in predefined urban square-block areas worldwide at any hour, any day of the week.

Visit http://skyhookwireless.com/spotrank/CMA.php to see Foursquare checkins, Tweets, Flickr photos, Music Fest concerts, and a heat map of all the mobile location requests coming out of Nashville. You can choose the speed at which the map plays, or just put it on autoloop and sit back and watch.  Move the time slider to show 8:30 pm on Thursday (6/11).  You will see a huge jump in activity at the LP Field concert stage, around the same time that Alan Jackson took the stage.  People were checking into the concert via Foursquare, commenting on the show on Twitter, and tagging photos like this one:

Over the course of festival SpotRank will give observers an exciting new view into the way that mobile device users interact with location-aware apps and how they move around a one-time event.
But looking forward, Music Fest serves as an example for how people are starting to use location-aware mobile apps and devices all over the world.

To use SpotRank for your event, contact spotrank@skyhookwireless.com

We are pleased to announce the release of Skyhook Core Location SDK version 3.5.

Skyhook Core Location now provides hybrid positioning, incorporating data from GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell tower scans when available, across all supported platforms. By using Skyhook Core Location SDK in your app you will always get the most accurate position possible, in the least time, with the lowest power consumption.

In this release:

• Power efficiency - multiple optimizations to reduce power consumption
• Hybrid switching - improved automatic switching between GPS and Wi-Fi to ensure most accurate fix, with least time to fix
• Error estimation - more accurate error estimates
• Introduction of hybrid positioning (Wi-Fi and GPS combined) on Nokia/Symbian devices

Download it here today.

Skyhook put out a wide release of its Local Faves SDK for iPhone today.  Developers can now visit our site and download the full SDK version and begin integrating it into their iPhone apps.  Local Faves adds engaging location-aware features, like content tagging, checking-in, slick map views and user rankings to any app on this platform.

This initial release includes the abilities to tag content, check in on Foursquare, follow users, see maps of activity around you, view trends in any area, enable push notifications, publish content to Twitter Flickr and Facebook, and more.

Download now http://www.skyhookwireless.com/register/index.php

Skyhook recently awarded two iPod Touches to the winners of an Android app competition held in an Android app development class at Cal Poly.  More info about the class is available here. The two students developed an app called Reception Mapper, which shows actual data coverage of carriers across the US. The app uses the Skyhook Android SDK, which replaces native Android location with Skyhook’s Location Engine, to obtain exact user location. The app can show signal strength or network type carriers have in a user’s current area.

Check out Reception Mapper here.

Skyhook is excited to be provide students with the tools to create the best location-based apps possible, and to foster the invention of innovative uses of location.

Today Skyhook launched our first SDK for iPhone, called Local Faves.  Local Faves is designed to help developers add location tagging, and community and gaming functionality to any iPhone app.  The SDK brings the context of location to digital context-based apps, like music, wine, food, reference, books and more.  The features of the SDK create engaging communities within apps, driving user loyalty and more opportunities for monetization.  For example, in a Local Faves-enabled wine app, users could check-in to a restaurant via the wine they are drinking, giving the app developer the opportunity to broadcast user location.  Other features include fully customizable content tagging, allowing users to indicate that they loved, hated, favorite, saw, or read a piece of content within the app; and enabled sharing of this content and exactly where it was experienced via Facebook and Twitter.

In addition, developers can set up map views of Local Faves-tagged content, allowing users to, for instance, see where around the world their favorite song is playing, or view all songs playing locally. Then, a ranking feature provides stats on any piece of content to show who loves it, where, and location-based trends over time.

The initial launch includes partners like Audubon Field Guides, Drync and Appmakr.

Local Faves will be made available to developers in mid-April. To sign up to be notified when Local Faves is released, visit http://www.skyhookwireless.com/localfaves/register

Skyhook launched a new data intelligence service last week called SpotRank. SpotRank predicts the density of people in predefined urban square-block areas worldwide at any hour, any day of the week.

SpotRank is based on data from Skyhook’s Core Engine, which powers the location on tens of millions of devices. With this reach, the Core Engine network processes 300 million location requests daily. Skyhook has developed SpotRank by continually mining this anonymous location data to predict human behavior.

Skyhook provides four types of SpotRanks for 500 million square-block Spots in 770 metro areas around the world. Each Spot is assigned an average for every hour and day of the week. Check out some examples and use-cases of SpotRank here.

Visit SimpleGeo today to register for the SDK and start experimenting with the data.

Skyhook’s Maps Booster app for Symbian became the top selling app in Ovi today.  We have received a huge amount of positive feedback from users worldwide, and were even featured this week on the Nokia Ovi Daily Apps blog by Nokia themselves.  We are excited about all of the positive feedback and are looking forward to our download numbers increasing even further and spreading the use of Maps Booster across the globe.

Three more Android apps launched last month with Skyhook integrated to provide improved location services.  The first was Free Parking, a social networking app that allows users to find open parking spots nearby.  Users employ location share the position of their parking spot with others.  If you are looking for a parking spot, you can check the map to show taken or free shared parking spots.

Skyhook also launched with an app called ComingUp, an events finder tool.  The app uses data from Upcoming and Eventful  and location from Skyhook to show users events happening nearby.  You can limit the search to particular categories or search for specific events and view them on a map.  The app will also provide directions to the event.

Finally, AndShowtime integrated the Skyhook SDK, providing more accurate location for moviegoers.  The app uses Skyhook to show movie times nearby.  Users can also search by movie title, and add showtimes to their calendar.

All three apps are available for free today in the Android Marketplace.