Help Skyhook map WiFi hotspots, make iPhone Google Maps My Location more accurate

Are you the giving-type? Do you like to help others for the betterment of society? Well, you might be interested to hear that you can help Skyhook Wireless map WiFi hotspots in your area. If you’ll recall, Skyhook is the company that provides the iPhone’s v1.1.3 Google Maps’ My Location feature with WiFi hotspot location data, so contributing to their database should make the iPhone’s Google Maps My Location position-data more accurate and useful.

Here are the instructions on how to go about adding your positional data to Skyhook’s database (from iPhone Central):

1. Find your location as latitude, longitude

First we need to determine the location of the AP. Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) and find the location of your access point on the map. Center the map (double-click on it) on the location and then enter the following into your Address Bar:

javascript:void(prompt(”,gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

This will open a prompt giving you the latitude,longitude of the center of
the map. Copy and paste that into an email. If you are having problems there is a little more detailed tutorial here.

2. Find the MAC Address of your wireless access point

Next we need to get the MAC Address of your AP. This can be tricky, so its best to use software to find it. We recommend NetStumbler and iStumbler on Windows and Mac respectively. You can download the programs at the following links:

Windows: http://www.netstumbler.com/
Mac: http://istumbler.net/

Find your AP in the list and the associated MAC address for it. Now paste the MAC address in the email.

Now you should have a MAC address, latitude and longitude. Its good to recheck the location by pasting the latitude, longitude back into Google Maps to make sure its the right location. Once you verify it, send us the information and we’ll add them to the database. It may take up to a week before the AP is available when using your iPhone or iPod touch.

Just make sure you add accurate data, okay? It would be ashame to actually lose positional resolution because a bunch of dimwits decided it would be funny to add inaccurate WiFi hotspot data. [IntoMobile]

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