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This post originally appeared on IoT Agenda. 

Location has fast become a must-have element for most connected solutions in order to wring as much value from the technology as possible. Adding location to your IoT product provides numerous — and sometimes surprising — advantages and capabilities. But creating a device that is able to find its own location or provide enough signal information to be located remotely is not necessarily a slam-dunk. With technology evolving constantly, there are details to consider before becoming connected — and the knowledge will help guide your path to success.

The Internet of Things has evolved from a mere buzzword to a new reality - one that’s approaching faster and at a larger scale than we thought possible. IDC forecasts worldwide spending on the Internet of Things to reach $772.5 billion in 2018 alone. But IoT is complex and harnessing it is easier said than done. While companies may be aware of IoT, they face the common struggles of understanding the use cases that apply to them, what the market opportunities are, and how to correctly implement it into their overall strategy. When it’s done right though, companies can exploit IoT and reap numerous benefits.

In this series so far, we’ve discussed the multi-step process of geopositioning billions of Wi-Fi access points. As a refresher, here are the steps we have covered to date:

Welcome to another installment of Skyhook Under the Hood: Geopositioning more than 1 Billion Wi-Fi access points! Our previous posts have outlined how to determine the location of a Wi-Fi access pointand how to gather on-device signals and information. Today, we’ll be walking through how to get signals to server, or get beacon locations to a device.

In the first installment of this series I talked about how we use geolocated Wi-Fi beacons to determine the location of a Wi-Fi enabled device. Then last week, we walked through how our location services are organized. Now I’ll go into how we determine the location of those Wi-Fi beacons, the first step in the process outlined above.

In my last post, I gave a historical look at Skyhook and provided a high-level view of how Skyhook’s positioning system works. We introduced how our network of beacons is a constantly shifting, living network, which represents a fairly significant challenge, especially when you scale globally. The world of Wi-Fi is a big, dynamic, moving, changing, growing beast. And our goal has long been to tame this beast.

Skyhook has long been a quiet member of the billion transaction club. For years, we’ve been handling billions of location requests around the globe, augmenting and accelerating end-device location capabilities since before the original iPhone came to market. Hundreds of millions of devices have relied on Skyhook to ensure that location is not only accurate, but that it is responsive and helps provide optimal user experience to the users of those devices.

But we’ve never really talked about how we do what we do. This post begins a series of articles that describe various aspects of the Skyhook system:

You may have noticed that Skyhook is rapidly changing. We are listening to the feedback of our users and the industry and doing a little bit of looking into our crystal ball. The result is the new My.Skyhook experience with an improved registration process, a dynamic view of analytics, a quicker way to access documentation and product evaluations and an easy way to keep track of projects that use Skyhook technology.  

Get started by creating your new My.Skyhook account to personalize your experience. Our streamlined registration process has been updated to make it easier for you to get from registration to your first Skyhook project. Just sign up and sign in to your account and you can get access to the Precision Location SDK as well as our newest product, Hyperlocal IP.  

CardStar, a mobile rewards app from Constant Contact used by more than 4 million consumers worldwide, enables shoppers to store all of their loyalty cards and key tags on their mobile devices. CardStar is delivering a dynamic location-based user experience that improves the app’s usability by decreasing time spent manually searching for cards.