Shortly after SXSW I was contacted by Kate Imbach who coordinates the developer program at Skyhook Wireless as a Location Awareness Marketing Manager the Director of Marketing and Developer Programs. She wanted to tell me about their current applications in the emerging area of location-based technology on-campus. As someone living on a college campus, I was interested in learning more about this and discussing with her possible applications for benefiting the lives of students on campus. I decided to interview her via Skype on March 28th and she was happy to oblige. I have been using the service since late March and I will also provide further analysis on my demoing of their product.

What is Loki?
Loki works with any wifi-enabled device in order to provide precise location positioning which can be shared. Loki uses the Skyhook Wireless’ Positioning System (WPS), a software-only location-based system to accomplish this task.

There is worldwide coverage for the service available in about 8500 cities/towns at the time of my interview. The skyhook reference database is continually being updated as drivers/walkers map the location of Wi-Fi access points (also called war-driving). The signal is picked up based on the mac address of the Wi-Fi enable device being used.

Relevance for Campuses
There are a number of possible applications for campuses such as campus security, location-based games, or integrated into a campus transportation system.

I was interested in how this system might be integrated into my own campus such as our shuttle bus system. I know that sometimes the bus just doesn’t show up on the route and having a way to let people along the route know its present location might be useful.

A White Paper report which described results by Skyhook and independent third parties conducted a series of performance field tests comparing the WPS capacity against GPS. One of the key findings within what they described as an Urban Canyon (a downtown area with buildings averaging more than 6 stories) found median accuracy to be 20-30 meters and availability to be 97% indoors and 98.8% outdoors.

Demoing Loki
In order to demo Loki, I went to their download page for firefox mac users from their webpage. Once downloaded and activated, an icon appeared to the left of the URL location on the toolbar. Pressing the Loki icon will activate my location. I have always found it to be very precise as shown by the example when I typed in Vancouver Art Gallery instead.

There is also a location feature called my.loki which I have yet to try. According to the website:

MyLoki location-enables social networking. As you travel around MyLoki can automatically let your friends know where you are using your favorite platform — Facebook, RSS Feeds, badges for your blog or even Jaiku. You can pick and choose how and where you want your location displayed.

There are a couple of posts on the topic of location awareness that I have read recently. The first is by Chris Messina and the second is by Todd Sieling regarding location and identity.

Relevance: Location awareness applications are becoming more commonplace whether automatically or manually shared as more people desire to let their friends know where they are. What are the implications for society as we continue to share where we are and what we are doing?