What to do with 500M location requests a day?

Skyhook Wireless provides hybrid positioning to millions of mobile devices around the world. Using an approach that integrates cell, WiFi, and GPS signals, the system services over 500 million location requests daily. This results in a massive and perpetually growing artifact of device locations anchored in time and place. Using this time-stamped location data, we are able to measure aggregated mobile device activity with extreme local accuracy, to any required resolution, across thousands of cites worldwide. Providing location services to such a large population of devices allows Skyhook to continuously improve positioning quality by reconciling signal maps returned from adjacent requests. It also provides an unparalleled tool for quantifying social behavior in space and time. We describe one analytical output of these data – SpotRank - which presents a normalized week of discrete, measured hours across the entire global Skyhook service area. SpotRank provides a method to compare a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: COMGEO
• Authors: Kipp Jones, Richard Sutton
• Keywords: Applied Computing, COMGEO 2011, Degree Tiles, GPS Signals, Skyhook Wireless