Skyhook Wireless Announces Local Faves for iPhone Developers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Skyhook Wireless today announced at the 2010 O?Reilly Where 2.0 conference Local Faves, a SDK that helps developers add location tagging, community and check-in functionality to any iPhone app. Developers traditionally use location in apps that are tied to the physical environment, like navigation, social networking, weather, and search. Local Faves is designed to bring the context of location to digital content-based apps, like music, wine, food, reference, books, and more.

?Article tagging by location is an often-requested feature, and integrating Local Faves will save us months of development time.?

Local Faves helps developers create engaging communities within apps, driving user loyalty and more opportunities for monetization. In a Local Faves-enabled iPhone wine app, users could check-in to a restaurant via the wine they?re drinking, giving the wine app developer the opportunity to directly broadcast user location. Local Faves features fully customizable content tagging, allowing users to indicate that they loved, hated, ?favorited?, saw, or read a piece of content within an app, and enables sharing of this content, and exactly where it was experienced, via Facebook and Twitter.

?In mobile we are starting to see location used in brand new ways. Location is no longer confined for use in navigation and social networking apps,? said Kate Imbach, vice president of marketing at Skyhook Wireless. ?We built Local Faves to encourage this trend and help developers change the way they think about and use location in their apps.?

"We have a very large and passionate community of wine lovers who use Drync Wine to research and track wine they enjoy. Local Faves adds social elements to Drync that extend the user experience beyond the individual," said Brad Rosen, CEO of Drync. "With Local Faves, our users can log where they drink and buy wine, and see who's drinking what wines nearby."

Developers can set up map views of Local Faves-tagged content, allowing users to, for example, see where around the world their favorite song is playing, or view all songs playing locally. To make it even more interesting, a rankings feature provides stats on any piece of content, like a song, book, movie, or article, to show who loves it, where, and location-based trends over time.

?Once integrated into our products, Local Faves will give the Audubon Guide Series of mobile field guide apps exciting new features. It will allow our community of users to get information about species sightings nearby, share sightings on Twitter and Facebook, post photos, and add comments. By encouraging our users to share their experiences with others, Local Faves will help Audubon Guides accomplish its ultimate goal of promoting the appreciation of the nature around us,? said David Roberts, CEO of Green Mountain Digital, developer of Audubon Guides apps.

?We?re planning to add Local Faves features to our platform for news apps,? said Scott Suhy, CEO at PointAbout, the developers of the iPhone app development platform, AppMakr. ?Article tagging by location is an often-requested feature, and integrating Local Faves will save us months of development time.?

Local Faves will be made available to developers in mid-April. To sign up to be notified when Local Faves is released, visit http://www.skyhookwireless.com/localfaves/register.

About Skyhook Wireless

Skyhook Wireless is the worldwide leader in location positioning, context and intelligence. In 2003, Skyhook pioneered the development of the Wi-Fi Positioning System to provide precise and reliable location results in urban areas. Today, Skyhook's Core Engine provides positioning to tens of millions of consumer mobile devices and applications. For more information visit www.skyhookwireless.com.