Skyhook Wireless touches down in Europe 15th July 2008 By Bhavana Navuluri Skyhook Wireless, a provider of Wi-Fi and hybrid positioning systems, has set up sales and operational offices in Europe and expanded the coverage throughout the UK and Europe.

Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, said: "Skyhook's European expansion is an important step towards our goal of delivering consumer-ready location across any environment, indoors or outside, in rural areas or downtown, in Berlin or Boston."

Skyhook's Wi-Fi positioning system makes use of access points in major cities to provide location information indoors and in dense urban areas. The company's hybrid positioning system, XPS, combines signals from Wi-Fi access points, GPS satellites and cell towers to deliver overall location for mass market handsets.

Skyhook now claims to provide coverage to over 130 million people in Europe by mapping over 16 million Wi-Fi access points in Europe. Skyhook's fleet of 200 European data collection specialists has driven over 750,000 km.

BuddyPing, a mobile social utility and Rummble, a location-based content discovery tool in the UK; and Locle, a social mapping application for mobile phones in Ireland, have selected Skyhook's software to integrate into their applications.

Skyhook has recently entered into a partnership with CSR to provide advanced location capabilities to latter's Wi-Fi silicon. CSR's UniFi, embedded Wi-Fi chips, and GPS location services will be combined with Skyhook's positioning capabilities, to enable device makers to support and launch location-based services.