This year Skyhook acquired important new business, received accolades from prominent figures in the industry and helped to forever change the way the world uses and receives location.

Skyhook started off 2008 with a bang following the announcement of our partnership with Apple. As Steve Jobs announced the integration of Wi-Fi Positioning onto the iPhone at Macworld he declared, “Isn’t that cool? It’s really cool… And it works doggone well.” After that, more companies and developers began seeing the benefit of adding location to their products.

Skyhook also teamed up with many developers to location-enable applications. One popular application type was social networking. Trapster created a network of drivers who could alert one another of upcoming speed traps, and Tagggit uses to use location to make local recommendations and help friends find one another. Other developers looked to Skyhook to enhance their geotagging apps. Eye-Fi now offers a WPS-enabled digital camera memory card. Similarly, locr used WPS to geotag photos people take with mobile phones. Geotagging apps previously had solely integrated GPS, and could not provide consumers with accurate or fast enough location. We also paired up with several different laptop theft solution companies, including GadgetTrak and Awareness Technologies. Centrix.ca also relied on Skyhook to upgrade their Mac application to customize users’ settings based on location. Developers were generally interested in integrating our WPS to provide better accuracy and availability in all environments.

Another milestone for 2008 was Skyhook’s announcement of XPS, the hybrid positioning system. XPS combines raw readings from GPS, Cell ID, and Wi-Fi. Hybrid positioning offers fast, precise and reliable location results across all environments. Skyhook raised the bar for location technology, and made consumers aware that they can expect more than the location performance provided by GPS alone.

Skyhook also partnered with several industry-leading chipset makers in 2008. These included Qualcomm, CSR and Broadcom. These partnerships demonstrate the desire for chipset makers to move towards single hybrid positioning systems. As with all of our other partnerships, it would also mean near-instant location fixes and elimination of environment limitations for consumers.

Skyhook also collaborated with Symbian OS in its latest software version, v 9.5. This integration will enable Symbian customers to dramatically improve the performance of location-aware applications. Symbian has recognized that location apps require location inputs from multiple sources-GPS, Wi-Fi, and Cell ID. Now location can work on Symbian just as well as it does in the iPhone.

We are excited for the New Year, and look forward to pushing location-based services to the limit in 2009 and beyond.

Just as we’ve done with iPhone applications, we at Skyhook Wireless have been carefully tracking and studying the release of Android applications since the launch of the G1. While the sheer number of applications is not as impressive as the iPhone yet, it is clear that developers are increasingly interested in producing applications that use location, and users are eager to download them.

Many similarities exist between the location applications on the iPhone and the G1. Both phones contain a wide variety of location app types. The numbers of applications that fall under each category differ slightly, however the most common types are shared between the two phones. For instance, social networking and local search are two of the most common types of location apps found on both the iPhone and the G1. In addition, location-based apps are being developed in increasing numbers. The iPhone contains over 600 location-based applications, and on the G1 these account for nearly 17% of its total number of apps available for download.

There are also some stark differences between the two. The total number of applications on the iPhone far exceeds that of the G1, and this could obviously be attributed to the amount of time it has been available. However the interesting distinction lies in the number of applications added each day or week, an area where the iPhone easily outnumbers the G1. The iPhone adds hundreds, and sometimes thousands of applications each week. For example, the number of applications added to the iPhone during the week of 11/22 was 2,977. Meanwhile, the G1 is adding apps at a much slower rate. For the same week in November, the G1 only added 52 applications. On some days the G1 adds as many as 12 apps, where other days as few as one.

Our research so far has shown that location-based applications certainly have a large presence on both of these popular phones. As the number of apps offered on each phone increases, the number of location-based apps will raise as well, and it will be exciting to see this percentage become a larger portion of the total number available in the app stores.