Already one of the top apps in the Android Market, Sherpa is about to get better.  Today sees Geodelic announcing a partnership with Skyhook Wireless which will make the application much more accurate in reporting locations.

Skyhook offers a major enhancement to the application’s location awareness. This allows Geodelic to more accurately target content for a user, whether they are in a mall or walking down the street. We developed Sherpa to give users a customized experience based on their location and interests. Skyhook provides the location performance that our application demands. – Rahul Sonnad, CEO, Geodelic

For those unfamiliar, Sherpa allows users to find the most relevant information based on their locations and preferences. Over time, the application uses your likes and dislikes to prioritize results. The app can be used to find restaurants, attractions, retailers, and much more!

We were contacted by Geodelic to tell us that Skyook is running within the app now.  They also claim that more partnership announcements are right around the corner!

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Skyhook Wireless, provider of the patented Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) and the hybrid positioning system XPS, today announced a partnership with Geodelic, developer of the new Android mobile application, Sherpa.

Sherpa, developed by Geodelic specifically for T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G with Google, allows users to effortlessly discover the most relevant information based on their location and preferences. Created by Geodelic, the application learns your likes and dislikes through behavior and user feedback, prioritizing recommended retailers, restaurants and attractions. Seamlessly blending behavior recognition, a recommendation engine and location-relevant information, this combination of learning is exclusive to Sherpa and unlike any experience currently on the market. For brands and businesses, Geodelic also enables businesses to quickly create customized mobile experiences that provide informational and promotional content relevant to their locations.

“Skyhook offers a major enhancement to the application’s location awareness,” said Rahul Sonnad, CEO and founder at Geodelic. “This allows Geodelic to more accurately target content for a user, whether they are in a mall or walking down the street. We developed Sherpa to give users a customized experience based on their location and interests. Skyhook provides the location performance that our application demands.”

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It's a good thing Geodelic warned us about what was just around the corner!

The applications we make here at Geodelic are designed to be useful, intuitive and insightful…but they can also be fun and interesting.  Have you come across an unusal point-of-interest (POI) while using Sherpa on your Android phone? We would love to hear about it. I’ve already found a few.

Most recently I was on Topsail Island, North Carolina enjoying a day at the beach with sun and good conversation.  The talk somehow turned to shark attacks and how prolific they can be in the warm water off the North Carolina coast.  A quick news search revealed an attack last year on a little girl that was injured, but not too badly. While talking about this, we decided to look for a place to eat, so mid-conversation I fired up the Geodelic application to see what was nearby. The first result speaks for itself in this screenshot.  Ha!  Needless to say, we didn’t go.

What about you? If you find an interesting POI take a pic and let us know…we will probably do something interesting with it.  Upload it to our Facebook fan page or let us know about it in the comments.

BOSTON, MA‐ August 18, 2009‐ Skyhook Wireless, provider of the patented Wi‐Fi Positioning System (WPS) and the hybrid positioning system XPS, today announced a partnership with Geodelic, developer of the new Android mobile application, Sherpa.

Sherpa, developed by Geodelic specifically for T‐Mobile’s myTouch 3G with Google, allows users to effortlessly discover the most relevant information based on their location and preferences. Created by Geodelic, the application learns your likes and dislikes through behavior and user feedback, prioritizing recommended retailers, restaurants and attractions. Seamlessly blending behavior recognition, a recommendation engine and location‐relevant information, this combination of learning is exclusive to Sherpa and unlike any experience currently on the market. For brands and businesses, Geodelic also enables businesses to quickly create customized mobile experiences that provide informational and promotional content relevant to their locations.

“Skyhook offers a major enhancement to the application’s location awareness,” said Rahul Sonnad, CEO and founder at Geodelic. “This allows Geodelic to more accurately target content for a user, whether they are in a mall or walking down the street. We developed Sherpa to give users a customized experience based on their location and interests. Skyhook provides the location performance that our application demands,” said Rahul Sonnad, CEO of Geodelic.

“The most cutting edge apps like Sherpa now depend on location. Mobile consumers have come to expect content to be delivered within this context,” said Kate Imbach, director of marketing at Skyhook Wireless.

Click the “read all” link below for a full list of categories and winners.

Few apps have hit the Android Market with as much buzz as Sherpa. The location-awareness, point-of-interest finding, user behavior learning app has become one of the most talked-about Android offerings since it debuted on the U.S. market last week. Androinica.com had a chance to discuss Sherpa with Rahul Sonnad, Founder & CEO of Geodelic, the small startup that created Sherpa. Below are Sonnad’s comments to address privacy concerns, Sherpa’s usefulness, and issues affecting the app’s availability outside the United States.

Androinica: How was Sherpa conceived?

Rahul Sonnad: We really felt now that mobile phones have accurate location awareness, the consumer scenario is really powerful. If you know where you are, you should be able to come up with information that is really relevant. If you’re in front of a restaurant, you may want a review of that place. If you’re at a beach, maybe you want surfing information. I had a laptop with an EVDO modem and a little GPS and we just figured that you could really build the software to make the process of connecting internet information with locations very well.

What made you incorporate the carousel?

We looked at various [methods] for showing information like on a map or augmented reality interfaces. We decided the carousel was a very appropriate interface because it’s a little bit forgiving in that you can have an arbitrary number of items in the carousel; whether they’re spaced in a very tight area or across a wide area, you still see them all. The problem with a map is that it’s so literal that often you get crowded out or things are too small. We liked the carousel and find that it’s very conducive to letting the user take the last 50 or 100 feet and skewer it to what they really want to focus on.

Thursday was the first day you could get your hands on a myTouch, the new Android phone from T-Mobile.

The most interesting thing isn’t the phone itself. Oh, it’s a nice phone with much better battery life than the first Anroid phone, the G1. But more interesting are two apps that T-Mobile has been promoting heavily alongside the rollout.

What makes those highly touted apps of interest is that one is a smart example of what an app should be and the other is a missed opportunity. And therein may lie a lesson for the industry.

The smart example is Sherpa, an app that learns your likes and dislikes, then makes recommendations of nearby restaurants, shopping and such, wherever you go.

Sherpa is sentient. And it’s the one thing that’s kicking T-Mobile into the top spot. Developed as an application and propagated initially by the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, this app serves as a mobile connoisseur that learns about places you search for in its wide database. Sherpa adapts your browsing habits and learns from the places you frequent, the items you browse and makes recommendations based on your preferred listings.

Sherpa goes as far as looking at the date and time and matching your results based on the time when you browse — allowing you to see relevant information such as the store hours of certain shops.

GENIE (Geodelic Engine for Interest Evaluation) is the secret to Sherpa’s success. Usually, consumers would want to download specific types of city guides catering to books, restaurants, stores, etc. Sherpa tailor fits your habits, which means that if you’ve been searching for restaurants more often, GENIE will make places to eat a more prominent search than, say, shopping.

Though the news actually leaked out a bit early in the “AppPack” at the end of July, Geodelic’s location-based Android app called Sherpa was officially launched yesterday for all Android users.

Sherpa combines “Web 2.0″-style profiling with location-based and contextual data to suggest nearby attractions, restaurants and retailers. Using a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation), Sherpa automatically learns a user’s favorite locations and lifestyle behavior.  If a user eats out more than shops, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores. Sherpa will also only give suggestions that are pertinent to the time of day, so if you run a search at 2:00 am looking for government offices, you’re not likely get anything without searching specifically.

I had originally intended to run some serious urban tests of Sherpa when it became available yesterday, seeing if it could discover a new 24-hour kebab joint with free Wi-Fi or something similarly suited to my tastes. But alas, due to my poor scheduling, I’ve been stationed this week in a remote beach resort in North Carolina (working instead of drinking copious amounts of tropical-flavored alcoholic beverages).

But that’s okay. I can still harness the single mighty bar of GPRS to see what Sherpa recommends when you’re in a location outside of a city less than 2 square miles in size with a population of less than 500.

Sherpa, a location-based services application developed by Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup Geodelic, is among the fastest-growing applications for Google’s Android. In the past week, the company claims that it has seen 50,000 downloads from the Android market. The T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, which launched earlier today, has been providing the impetus for growth.

Nearly 4,500 copies of the app were downloaded today alone. Sherpa, as we’ve previously explained, constantly learns your favorite locations and starts to aggregate them. The more you use the application, the smarter it gets, thereby serving up location information that’s unique to you.

The idea of an application such as Sherpa (and to some extent, Where) makes a lot of sense as we start leveraging the location beacon to do our thinking. I have been playing around with the Sherpa app on my Google I/O version of MyTouch and so far it works as advertised. As I spend more time with it, I will share my experience.