Wow. I don't know what's exactly protected in their patent, but I have a suspicion they shouldn't have gotten it in the first place. Looks like their business model is mostly trolling, or rather keeping everyone else hostage by their overreaching IP.
Also:
> In 2016, Skyhook introduced a range of innovative [sic] products tailored for the advertising technology sector: Retailer Personas, Power Personas, and On-Demand Personas. Leveraging Skyhook's vast processing capabilities handling billions of location data points, these solutions empower marketers to finely tune consumer targeting by analyzing past locations, enabling personalized mobile marketing campaigns.
I struggle to understand how a company whose IP essentially amounts to using RF emitters as geolocation sources based on simultaneous correlation with GPS data and other known geolocated RF sources can amass apparently between 600 and 700 patents on this "innovation".
I know that they sued Google over their Android NLP implementation and Google lost on almost all of the enumerated complaints, Apple started using Skyhook beginning with early versions of iOS, and Microsoft apparently also uses them.
What they have seemingly done with the assistance of an absurd number of patents that they apparently keep getting granted by the USPTO (which is known for issuing boatloads of junk patents), is take a fairly obvious tactic which amounts to one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing - the WiFi "wardriving" practice - and find ways to patent-encumber that technique that they did not invent until they have engineered what appears to be a complete monopoly on it.
I'm also curious how the legal landscape of that business may have changed after the Qualcomm acquisition. IIRC at one point in time Qualcomm was licensing Skyhook data.
