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.”

Read More »

Do you have a pre-lease build (114) of Sherpa? This is what to do to make your experience better.

If you have a pre-release version (build 114) of Sherpa on your T-Mobile myTouch 3G or other Android mobile , you’re going to want to uninstall it and then install the current release, and there are some technical reasons for this that will dramatically improve your experience.

A little history: we built a version of the Sherpa application for use by the press for pre-release reviews, but that build got out onto the internet and became available to the public, as sometimes happens.  Although this was not an official release, we were thrilled to hear the overwhelmingly positive response to the application, and to see people really talking it up around the various social networks.

There are a couple of things you need to know about that build.

(1) It was built using a private internal developer certificate, with an expiration date set to a fairly short-term expiration that (we thought) would only affect perhaps a couple of dozen reporters and our QA team.  However, if you installed a copy of build 114 it will also affect you. What this means is if you have this early build, you must uninstall it before you can go to the Android Marketplace and install the release version of Sherpa.

(2) Build 114 used a third-party library for obtaining your location. However, it used a test account to obtain that information, so it is very likely that the application is not accurately finding your location. One of the things that makes Sherpa so incredible is its pinpoint accuracy in finding out where you are.

The good news is, the fix for this is really simple.  Uninstall build 114, then go to the Android Marketplace and search for “Sherpa”, download and install.  Then…have fun with the official release, and let us know on Twitter or Facebook what you think! If you are reading this on your Android phone, just click this link to go directly to the download site.

Thank you, and as always, if you have any questions let us know in the comments!

We’re so excited to announce that Sherpa has officially been launched! What a ride, and it’ s only just begun. The office is buzzing and today has just been a whirlwind of excitement. It’s been a lot of fun reading what users are saying (for the most part it’s been very positive) and it seems like our hard work has paid off. We hope you get a chance to give it a test drive too! All you have to do is search for “Sherpa” on the Android Market OR even better just type “sherpa.geodelic.com “ into your Google Android browser to download.

We know that a lot of people have been waiting for this release, so if you know of somebody that could benefit from this incredible, location based service experience then help us spread the word!  We’ve already shrunk the URL for you to make it easy to put up on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and your other social networks.  Please use “http://bit.ly/sherp” to link to the download page from your Android mobile device.  You can also click here to automatically post this message to your Twitter account!

Thank you for all of your support and suggestions as we make Sherpa the best it can be for you!  If you need help with it at any time, don’t hesitate to drop us a line here.

Yes, we only launched it this morning, and there is already an update this afternoon.

Yeah, I know, I know. “What’s going on out there in Santa Monica?”

Well, it turns out that as soon as we started getting massive downloads our server logs showed a problem with one of the requests the phone was making. While it was a minor issue that only affect a very small fraction of phones–and while the client recovered immediately after making the bad request (so it didn’t affect anyone’s actual experience), it turns out the bad request was, well, bad.

And with the unanticipated popularity of this app, a minor problem creating a bad request that only affects a very small fraction of phones out there scaled up to become a major pain in the neck for our server.

So, at the last minute we decided to slip out a fix which resolved this bug.

(For the technically inclined, the fundamental problem is that during startup on a phone that has never used GPS before, there is a race condition in the state machine which manages the list of known POIs and the code which obtains the position. This race condition created a very small window where a search request gets sent to the server that doesn’t actually contain a location to look for. The request then returns “no cigar”–which causes the client to try again, but with the location.

Which isn’t a problem, except the server really didn’t like it. Of course we have more than enough capacity for our projected usage–but why flood the back-end with bad requests?)

Yes, we really tested this thing. Our crack team of testers and developers are some of the best people I have ever worked with in my 21 years as a professional software developer. But this was one of those really weird cases that only affected a very small fraction of phones that we would never have caught if we weren’t just so darn popular!