Anti-theft technology for mobile devices just got smarter. Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced today that its location-finding software has been deployed by Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) in its new Norton Anti-Theft Web service. Financial details weren’t given, but the arrangement will put Skyhook’s software on more devices over a broader range of applications—namely, security.

The anti-theft Web service enables people to lock, locate, and, if all goes well, recover a lost or stolen laptop (Windows-based), smartphone (Android), or tablet (Android)—all from afar. Skyhook’s technology, which uses Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS signals to locate a given device, is already used by tens of millions of devices and applications, the company says.

Skyhook has been embroiled in two lawsuits against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) since last year. The suits allege that the search giant infringed on four of Skyhook’s patents and interfered with deals that Skyhook made with Motorola and Samsung. Those deals involved putting Skyhook’s location-finding software on Android devices.

Symantec’s deployment of Skyhook’s software is the latest example of how Skyhook has managed to maneuver its technology onto Android devices despite its feud with Google, which, like Apple, wants to own location technology for its devices itself.

Back in May, Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan talked about his company’s technology being deployed by MapQuest, Citysearch, Priceline, and other Web applications on Android (and other) devices. “We’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers,” he said.

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There wasn’t a surfeit of tech news last week, but what we had was meaty. Your Monday tech briefing has arrived.

—Web technology development has become an increasingly important focus at San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), especially at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, the chip-design business also known as QCT. As the number of software engineers at QCT outpaces the number of hardware engineers, product management director Sy Choudhury says, “This whole move to Web apps, and programming in Javascript and HTML instead of C++, is a very big trend for the whole industry.”

—MeLLmo, the Del Mar, CA-based provider of Web-based visualization software for the iPhone and iPad, raised $30 million in a venture capital round led by Sequoia Capital. The startup previously raised $20 million from private investors. MeLLmo plans to expand its suburban San Diego headquarters and establish a global presence.

—The Irvine, CA-based Tech Coast Angels have joined with the Menlo Park, CA-based Band of Angels and New York City’s Golden Seeds to create the Angel Syndication Network, a way of spotlighting angel-funded startups in each region for individual investors in other cities. Richard Sudek, chairman of the Tech Coast Angels, says several additional angel groups are in the process of joining the new Angel Syndication Network, including Seattle’s Alliance of Angels and the Pasadena Angels near Los Angeles.

—Qualcomm has combined its proprietary Femtocell modem chipset with Wi-Fi and Ethernet equipment (used to set up wireless local area networks) made by Atheros, the San Jose-based data communications company that Qualcomm acquired earlier this year. Adding Qualcomm’s femtocell to the Wi-Fi box expands the capabilities of wireless networks.

—New York-based Cellfish, a mobile and social applications publisher, acquired San Diego’s Bandsintown, the live concert tracking service and app for discovering new touring artists. Bandsintown, which was launched by Todd Cronin in Somerville, MA, before moving to San Diego, helps 3.4 million music fans track their favorite artists on Facebook. (Wade profiled the company here.) Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless, which has been on quite a romp over the past year or so, recently raised $11.5 million of a planned $14.7 million round from investors, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The investors were not disclosed in the filing.

On-Ramp, which was founded in 2008 to develop low-power wireless networking technology for smart grid and other utility-scale applications, previously raised at least $16.5 million.

Last week, the company also landed an undisclosed dollop from a $63 million pool that GE and four VC firms awarded to 10 cleantech companies as part of the “GE ecoimagination Challenge.” The U.S. Department of Energy awarded On-Ramp a $2.1 million grant in November as part of an initiative to help modernize the nation’s electric grid infrastructure.

On-Ramp also has been drawing increased attention. MIT’s Technology Review (popular among techies) profiled the company this week, and in December, CEO Joaquin Silva gave a presentation at Xconomy’s very own “5×5: Five Cities, Five Big Tech Ideas” in Boston.

And then there was the recognition that On-Ramp got last September from no less than the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, which named On-Ramp to its 2011 global list of “technology pioneers.”

On-Ramp’s wireless network technology uses the same frequency as Wi-Fi, but the system operates with much less power, using advanced algorithms to filter extraneous radio interference and keep the network locked onto its own signals. It sounds a bit like modern Astronomy.  On-Ramp says its “Ultra-Link Processing” technology transmits data at a trickle, just 50 bits a second compared to 5 million bits for a Wi-Fi Internet connection. But the system can collect sensor data from an underground utility vault, and is capable of transmitting its signals 45 miles. The company told Tech Review a trial network in San Diego County requires just 35 strategically located access points across a 4,000-square-mile area to collect data from smart meters and other sensors.

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GainSpan, a San Jose, CA-based maker of Wi-Fi modules embedded in a range of devices, has increased the size of a recent round of equity-based funding to $10.15 million, according to an amended regulatory document filed last week. The company reported in November 2010 that it had raised $5.1 million in the round, with part of the funds coming from Intel Capital. Other previous backers of GainSpan include New Venture Partners, Opus Capital, OVP Venture Partners, and Sigma Partners.

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San Francisco-based JiWire, which operates an online advertising network targeting public Wi-Fi networks in places such as airports, said today that it has raised $20 million in new funding. New investor Trident Capital led the Series C round, which was joined by existing investors Comcast Interactive Capital, DFJ Frontier, Norwest Venture Partners, and Panorama Capital. The company has raised $45 million all told. The company said the money would be used to “aggressively extend JiWire’s leadership position in location-based advertising.”

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San Francisco-based MapQuest, the mapping division of AOL (NYSE: AOL), will use hybrid GPS/Wi-Fi location-finding technology from Boston’s Skyhook Wireless in a forthcoming turn-by-turn navigation app for Android phones, according to an announcement today. The partnership helps to bolster Skyhook’s longstanding assertion that its location finding system is more accurate and reliable than the system Google builds into Android phones. “Skyhook is the leader in location positioning, and MapQuest’s partnership with them will provide better experiences and greater reliability to our Android customers,” said Christian Dwyer, MapQuest’s general manager and senior vice president, in a statement.

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Autonet Mobile, a San Francisco-based company that makes Wi-Fi hotspots for personal, corporate, and emergency vehicles, has raised $2.8 million in an offiering of equity, debt, and options, according to a regulatory filing. The investors in the round weren’t named, but Autonet’s website lists Morgenthaler Ventures and Easton Capital as previous backers. Autonet was founded by former racecar driver Sterling Pratz and former Nortel researcher Doug Moeller.

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Sunnyvale, CA-based Aerohive said yesterday that it has collected $25 million in a Series D financing round let by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Northern Light Venture Capital were also on board. The company makes wireless access points for local Wi-Fi networking in schools, hospitals, factories, and large businesses that self-organize into “hives,” eliminating the need for central controllers. The five-year-old company, which acquired Pareto Networks in January, said it will use the funds “to expand the company’s sales and marketing capabilities throughout the world and for future product/company acquisitions and/or the ability to enter into new markets.”

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Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced this week that its location-finding technology will be embedded in Sony Computer Entertainment’s forthcoming “NGP” handheld gaming system, which will roll out in late 2011. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the news comes on the heels of some other recent customer wins for Skyhook, including Intel and Citysearch. Skyhook’s software blends Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS data to provide a fast location reading for mobile devices.

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Redwood City, CA-based Bigfoot Networks today unveiled a new line of PC and notebook Wi-Fi adapters optimized for gaming. Called Killer Wireless-N, the adapters include “stream detect” technology that identifies and prioritizes game, video, and audio data to minimize delays and stutter. Bigfoot says it plans to demonstrate the technology at next week’s Game Developer Conference Expo in San Francisco.

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Boston-based Skyhook, a wireless technology firm, said today that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has licensed its location-finding software and will make the technology available on Intel chip-based devices. Skyhook also announced that Citysearch, the online local guide, has integrated Skyhook’s technology into its mobile and deals apps for Android devices. Financial details of the two agreements were not given. Skyhook’s software determines the location of a mobile device by combining data from Wi-Fi access points, GPS, and cell towers. The company is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Google over location-based intellectual property and business practices.

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Meraki, a San Francisco startup that makes wireless access points and routers that owners can manage via cloud connections, said today that it has raised $15 million in new capital in a round led by Sequoia Capital. The series C round brings the company’s total venture financing to $40 million.

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Going head-to-head with other location-based advertising platforms such as Boston-based Where, San Francisco startup JiWire today unveiled a mobile ad network called Compass that’s designed to serve ads directing consumers to nearby stores where a brand’s products are available. The ads use location data from a consumer’s smartphone, tablet, or laptop to show nearby retail locations, along with information about whether specific products are in stock. Clinique, Groupon, HP, and Ritz & Wolf Camera & Image have signed up as the Compass program’s initial advertisers. JiWire already provides advertising for splash screens for public Wi-Fi networks in locations such as airports, hotels, and coffee shops.

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The long Thanksgiving weekend put an early punctuation mark on last week’s technology and business news in the Bay Area. Here’s a glance back:

—StumbleUpon, the San Francisco “discovery engine” company founded in 2002, now rivals Facebook in the amount of social-media traffic it sends to websites. I profiled the company, which has had a fascinating trajectory as an independent startup, an eBay subsidiary, and now a privately owned eBay spinout.

—Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak briefly drove up the stock price of Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) with a remark to the effect that Apple had purchased the $5.3 billion speech technology company. Wozniak later said he’d been mistaken, but not before the story was picked up by numerous news outlets.

—Wireless carriers are searching for ways to lessen the burden on their 3G data networks, and I profiled a Sunnyvale, CA, company, Ruckus Wireless, that has a solution: adaptive, beam-forming Wi-Fi antennas that could help carriers “offload” data streams from 3G to Wi-Fi in dense areas such as public plazas or train stations.

—Here at Xconomy, we helped Boston-based Marginize launch its new Publisher Widget, a tool that shows social media conversations pertaining to each page on our site. You can use the widget (see the brown tab at the far right of your browser screen) to add your own Twitter posts or status updates on Facebook or Google Buzz.

—New York-based location services startup Foursquare announced that it’s staffing up its San Francisco office, which is co-located with Jack Dorsey’s Square in the Mission district.

—SolFocus, a Mountain View, CA, startup that makes photovoltaic panels featuring unique optical concentrators, raised $20 million from unnamed backers.

—YardSellr, founded by former eBay executives to help consumers buy and sell items over social media channels, raised $5 million from Accel Partners and Harrison Metal Capital.

—Menlo Park, CA-based Sequoia Capital led a venture round for New York-based blog platform provider Tumblr amounting to $25 to $30 million, according to reports. Tumblr hasn’t confirmed the details.

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Wi-Fi: it’s the new utility, as crucial to many consumers and businesspeople as electricity and telephones. Wi-Fi chips are built into 800 million new laptops, mobile phones, tablet PCs, printers, video game controllers, and TV set-top boxes every year, and Wi-Fi networks blanket virtually every office, library, airport, hotel, café, and campus.

If only Wi-Fi were as dependable as most other utilities. Unfortunately, the more people who install access points in dense urban environments, the more interference arises between devices, slowing everyone’s connections. On top of that, Wi-Fi signals share the unlicensed 2.4-Gigahertz frequency band with Bluetooth, Zigbee, cordless phones, baby monitors, car alarms, ham radio, and even microwave ovens. (Yes, Wi-Fi devices use roughly the same wavelength as the radio pulses that, at much higher power, can bake a potato.) That’s why you might have a blazing-fast, 30-megabit-per-second Wi-Fi connection in one corner of your office, but lose it a minute later if you shift six feet to the left. Especially if someone is using the microwave at lunchtime.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that Wi-Fi signals, like cellular or FM signals, spread indiscriminately in all directions. That’s a feature, not necessarily a bug: your home or office Wi-Fi router doesn’t know where you are, so it has to send signals everywhere. But what if your router were smarter, and could use modern beam-forming technology to shoot a signal straight at your device—then make that beam follow you as you moved from your desk to your couch to your kitchen? In principle, signals from a dynamic, directional Wi-Fi antenna would have a greater range, and would be far less vulnerable to interference.

Well, it turns out this is an idea radio engineers have been thinking about for a while. And there’s a company in Sunnyvale, CA, called Ruckus Wireless that’s making it work so well that cellular carriers may soon start placing Ruckus Wi-Fi systems in public places, where they could help rescue strained 3G networks by taking on much of the data traffic now squeezing through the 3G channel. That’s called “offloading,” and it’s one of the ways harried operators—whose networks now support unanticipated numbers of 3G devices like iPhones, iPads, and Android phones—hope to survive the interim years before the arrival of true 4G technologies, which could offer Wi-Fi-like speeds across much greater distances.

PCCW, Hong Kong’s leading telecom company, has been installing Ruckus Wi-Fi routers in phone booths, which tend to be located in places where there are also lots of people using cell phones. “Pedestrian gathering places are good places to put Wi-Fi access points,” Ruckus CEO Selina Lo says. “PCCW told me that in peak areas, at peak times, they can see as much as 20 percent offload.” If AT&T were able to hand off that much of its 3G traffic to Wi-Fi, it might be able to mollify many of the iPhone owners who are eager to switch to Verizon, on the (iffy) assumption that the other carrier’s network will have more capacity.

Incubated six years ago in the offices of Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park, CA, Ruckus has collected $51 million in venture backing, from Sequoia as well as Firelake Capital, Focus Ventures, Investor AB, Motorola Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and WK Technology Fund. It’s a scrappy and persistent company—the barking dog in its logo isn’t wholly whimsical—and it has reinvented its product line at least twice over the years to adapt to market trends. But the 278-employee startup, which flirted earlier this year with the idea of going public but put the idea on hold due to the sluggish economy, is now under pressure to find a major market for its smart Wi-Fi access points. So there’s a lot riding on the 3G offloading concept—an idea Ruckus adopted from one of its own customers in India, Mumbai-based Tikona Digital Networks (more on that below).

Lo argues that even after 4G technologies like Verizon’s LTE standard take hold, there will be a need for other shorter-range technologies to fill in the inevitable gaps in coverage. “Licensed spectrum is an expensive resource, so there is always going to be … Next Page »

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It’s been such an action-packed week in the technology world that I ran out of time to tell you about a few interesting local news items.

—Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software and Hipmunk, the Y Combinator-backed startup based in San Francisco and founded by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and computer-book author Adam Goldstein, announced that they had struck a licensing deal. Hipmunk’s graphical flight search interface speeds the process of canvassing airline travel options, and the startup has signed an agreement to use ITA’s QPX airfare shopping system as a data source for its own site. That will make it easier for Hipmunk to offer comprehensive flight choices.

But the real significance of the announcement may be as a non-agression pact. A few observers have grumbled about the striking resemblance between Hipmunk’s flight search matrix and a similar search results interface developed by ITA. But rather than pursue litigation (seemingly the default response to competition these days), ITA appeared to be offering a peace overture to the smaller company. “It is always good to see new start-ups entering the field,” ITA president and CEO Jeremy Wertheimer said in Hipmunk’s QPX announcement. “ITA is happy to partner with Hipmunk to help them improve the travel experience.” (The Department of Justice is currently reviewing Google’s bid to acquire ITA.)

—Vudu, a Santa Clara, CA-based subsidiary of Wal-Mart, announced a total overhaul of the user interface for its cloud-based movie delivery system. The new interface, which is optimized for wide-format, high-definition TVs and makes it easier to navigate between screens and get personalized movie recommendations, will show up by the end of the year on all Vudu-capable devices—meaning HDTVs and Blu-ray disc players from manufacturers like Funai, LG, Mitsubishi, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, and Vizio.

Vudu also announced that its service will be added to Sony’s PlayStation Network, meaning PlayStation3 owners will soon be able to access Vudu’s streaming, high-definition movies over their home Internet connections. Vudu said PS3 movie rentals would cost $2 for two nights, which is about half as much as the going rate for digital movie rentals from Apple or Amazon.

—JiWire, a San Francisco company that serves ads for those welcome screens you see when you log in to public Wi-Fi networks at coffee shops, hotels, and airports, released a study of trends in mobile and Wi-Fi usage, based on a survey of 1,200 users and data from 315,000 public Wi-Fi locations. Both the number of public Wi-Fi access points and the amount of time people spend using them continue to grow dramatically, at about 20 percent per year, the company found.

Remarkably, the study showed that the iPad—after only seven months on the market—is already the Number 3 non-laptop device used to access public Wi-Fi networks, after the iPhone and the iPod touch. In fact, people using iOS devices accounted for 90.8 percent of all public Wi-Fi usage in the third quarter of 2010. But that percentage was down slightly from the previous quarter; Google’s Android mobile operating system was the only one to gain market share during the quarter.

“iOS is still the top operating system by a huge margin, but we’ve seen it consistently decline against the other platforms, and Android is the one emerging as the constant growth platform,” JiWire senior vice president of marketing David Staas told me.

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Fremont, CA-based Quantenna Communications, which makes chipsets for broadband home networking over Wi-Fi, said today that it has collected $21 million in Series E financing, bringing its total venture pot to about $78 million. New investor DAG Ventures led the round, with, with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Sigma Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates also participating. The company says hardware like its multichannel MIMO 802.11n chipsets will be needed to carry multiple high-definition video streams within homes.

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ThingMagic is a 10-year-old technology company whose core idea seems as fresh today as when it first started. The bad news: that means it may have been too far ahead of its time. The good news: times are changing.

The Cambridge, MA-based firm was founded by five MIT Media Lab alums, who had the goal of “adding magic to everyday objects”—hence the company’s name. This “magic” came in the form of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which enable wireless communication by way of tiny electronic chips that can be embedded in things, accompanied by readers and software to make sense of what each tagged item is, and track its whereabouts. The big vision was to create an “Internet of things,” so people could retrieve information about the objects around them—everything from product inventory on shelves to stuff in your home, office, or car.

Sounds a bit far out even today, right? Well, it was far more so in the early 2000s, and the evolution of RFID ever since has been quite a rollercoaster ride. To make a long story short, the technology was strong but its business use was overhyped, so it got stuck on the adoption curve. Tech companies based around RFID have come and gone, but some have endured, such as Alien Technology, Impinj (which I wrote about here), and ThingMagic, which all have raised a fair amount of venture funding.

In July 2008, my colleague Wade wrote an in-depth piece on ThingMagic, focusing on the company’s progress in shrinking its RFID readers (its main product) down to a size where they could be put into places like offices and hospitals—a big step toward realizing the Internet of things. Around the same time, Mark Roberti, the founder and editor of RFID Journal told me that it would be another two to three years before the RFID market would take off, because end users were still figuring out the physics and economics of tags and readers.

Well, it has been two years, and I’m wondering what has changed in the RFID world. To get some answers—and an update to the company’s story—I recently sat down with ThingMagic co-founders Yael Maguire and Ravi Pappu, and director of marketing Ken Lynch, to talk about what lessons they’ve learned over the past decade. We met at the company’s new digs at One Cambridge Center in Kendall Square.

“After 10 years, we’ve seen literally hundreds and hundreds of ideas for using the technology,” says Maguire, the company’s chief technology officer. “It may not be ubiquitous, but in most cases it’s caught up with people’s imagination. People are focusing on how to deploy it.” Pappu, who runs product development and implementation, puts it this way: “The story is changing from RFID on everything to RFID in everything. That’s always been the vision of the Internet of things.”

It’s certainly in ThingMagic’s interest to promote all the new ways RFID is being used. But beyond any PR spin, there’s something real going on. Yes, there is the recent news that Wal-Mart plans … Next Page »

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When it comes to mobile software and devices these days, it’s all about location, location, location. And if you’re a small, leading-edge company in the sector—if you’ve played a pioneering role in bringing location-based technologies to market, and millions of devices use your software—well, you’d better watch your back.

That’s my take upon hearing the latest news from Boston-based Skyhook Wireless, the geo-location software firm. Yesterday, after a tumultuous few days in which the company acknowledged that Apple is no longer using Skyhook’s location-aware software in its new iPhones (since April) or the iPad, Skyhook announced it has been granted four new U.S. patents in Wi-Fi location and positioning technology.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition of events. On one hand, Apple is one of Skyhook’s biggest and most prominent customers. When Steve Jobs announced on stage at MacWorld in January 2008 that Skyhook’s technology would be part of a big iPhone software upgrade, Skyhook founder and CEO Ted Morgan called it “probably the biggest publicity event any company can have.” So it’s surely a serious blow to be dropped from these hot new devices. Apple apparently has its own Wi-Fi location information, presumably culled from the daily movements of iPhones around the country, that it thinks is good enough for its own devices. On the other hand, Skyhook is projecting confidence in its core technologies and, in any case, seems to be digging in for a fight to supply these technologies to more and more mobile manufacturers.

Following various media reports from TechCrunch (which first reported on the Apple and Skyhook angle last week), the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets, I wanted to hear what Skyhook had to say about the current situation, and about the evolving competition in location-based services—and how it affects Skyhook’s strategy. (All of this originally came about in response to a query about privacy made to Apple from a pair of U.S. congressmen, one from Massachusetts.)

First, some more background. Skyhook has been a darling of the Boston-area mobile software scene for a few years now. Its software determines a mobile device’s precise location based on the identities and locations of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and information from GPS satellites and cellular networks. The core technology is deployed on mobile devices made by Samsung, Motorola (Android phones), Dell, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments, among others—including Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch from 2008 until just this spring.

Meanwhile, Skyhook’s intellectual property—which now comprises 15 granted patents and 37 pending applications—falls into three main categories: building a Wi-Fi database for location, maintaining that data (which is challenging because Wi-Fi access points move around), and ensuring the highest accuracy possible through proprietary algorithms.

“We were the first ones to do all this,” says Skyhook’s Morgan. “The downside of being early is you have to wait seven years for stuff to come to market.”

And, as many tech pioneers have found out the hard way, being early isn’t necessarily … Next Page »

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“Knowing where someone is in real time—particularly if you have some context around that—is an incredibly valuable marketing opportunity.” So said Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson at a conference on geolocation in San Francisco this week. But sometimes it can be difficult to visualize that value—to imagine how proximity might translate into profit. Thanks to a collaboration between Boston’s Skyhook Wireless and the organizers of this weekend’s San Francisco Marathon, it will be possible for anyone to track how thousands of marathon spectators access location-based services on their mobile devices.

Skyhook, which makes the Wi-Fi- and GPS-based positioning software inside the Apple iPhone and iPad and many other mobile devices, has created an online map that will show geotagged mobile activity along the route of the San Francisco Marathon, which starts at 5:30 am on Sunday, July 25. Everytime someone in the crowd—or in the race, for that matter—uses a Skyhook-powered app to get a location reading, Skyhook will show it on the map.

And when they send Twitter updates, browse or upload geotagged photos on Flickr, or check in on Foursquare, that information will show up too, in near-real time. (There will be a delay of up to two hours for processing, according to Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s vice president of marketing.) The map even comes with a history slider that allows visitors to see how the data evolves over time.

The marathon map is a public version of Skyhook’s location intelligence service, called SpotRank, which is designed to show population density based on location requests. Skyhook has done this type of thing before—first at the Boston Marathon in April, and again at the Country Music Association Music Festival in Nashville, TN, last month—but the San Francisco project is the most elaborate yet, supplementing Skyhook’s basic location-request data with information pulled in from Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare.

What’s the point? Partly, it’s just an experiment—and a great marketing move, both for Skyhook and for partners hoping to move the geolocation business forward. “It’s new for us and new for [the San Francisco Marathon], and we don’t know exactly where it’s going, but we know it’s a new way to look at the urban environment in the context of mobile activity,” says Imbach. “Location requests are interesting, but when you add in the context of the social activity on mobile devices, it gets a lot more interesting….This type of data is potentially huge for advertisers.”

For example, it’s long been a vision of developers of location-based services to send discount offers over mobile channels to people who are near specific retail locations. The more context that’s available about what these people are doing or what they’re interested in, the more advertisers could tailor these offers.

The marathon map could also be interesting as a demonstration for urban planners, race course designers, or fans of individual runners, Imbach speculates. Aggregated geotagged data can also have unexpected uses. At the CMA Music Festival in Nashville, Imbach says, it was possible to determine which bands were playing at which stages—and even how excited the audiences were—simply by searching the tweets aggregated on Skyhook’s map for specific band names and for certain punctuation, such as exclamation points. Of course, the data on Skyhook’s maps is made anonymous and can’t be tracked to individual mobile users.

“Skyhook’s SpotRank map for The San Francisco Marathon allows us to provide a unique view into how the city of San Francisco adapts to the race,” said Lyz Luke, media coordinator for The San Francisco Marathon, in a statement. “The map creates a unique online hub for where spectators from all over the world can experience the excitement of the Marathon.”

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