Skyhook Wireless's Local Faves announced for iPhone Developers

Skyhook Wireless has announced at the 2010 O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference Local Faves, a SDK that helps developers add location tagging, community and check-in functionality to any iPhone app. Developers traditionally use location in apps that are tied to the physical environment, like navigation, social networking, weather, and search. Local Faves is designed to bring the context of location to digital content-based apps, like music, wine, food, reference, books, and more.

Local Faves helps developers create engaging communities within apps, driving user loyalty and more opportunities for monetization. In a Local Faves-enabled iPhone wine app, users could check-in to a restaurant via the wine they’re drinking, giving the wine app developer the opportunity to directly broadcast user location. Local Faves features fully customizable content tagging, allowing users to indicate that they loved, hated, ‘favorited’, saw, or read a piece of content within an app, and enables sharing of this content, and exactly where it was experienced, via Facebook and Twitter.

Developers can set up map views of Local Faves-tagged content, allowing users to, for example, see where around the world their favorite song is playing, or view all songs playing locally. To make it even more interesting, a rankings feature provides stats on any piece of content, like a song, book, movie, or article, to show who loves it, where, and location-based trends over time.

Local Faves will be made available to developers in mid-April. To sign up to be notified when Local Faves is released, visit http://www.skyhookwireless.com/localfaves/register.