Skyhook Wireless today announced a new service called SpotRank, a location-based consumer intelligence service based on hundreds of millions of anonymous location lookups processed daily through Skyhook's Wi-Fi and Cell-iD positioning engine.

"Skyhook's SpotRanks are comprised of anonymous information about how people travel throughout cities, the only source of behavioral intelligence of this magnitude available worldwide,” said Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless. “By allowing developers to play with this data we expect to see eye-opening uses of location. Developers will be able to create new applications or optimize existing applications in ways we've never even thought of before."

Because Skyhook powers location on tens of millions of mobile devices (including all iPhones), it gathered enough data to build detailed behavioral intelligence profiles for over half a billion 100 meter "spots" around the world. This new tool provides insight into the movement of crowds throughout urban areas. These profiles are based on historical trends in location lookup volume and time of day.

Such type of data was already available through wireless operators but in limited supply and not on a global scale. With this new service Skyhook can make it available in a very easy way for developers. It is however true that wireless operator's databases provides much more granularity and are not biased towards high end device owners - which is the case for Skyhook database since their technology is implemented mainly on smartphones.

This new service will be available via SimpleGeo, a new provider of LBS tools for developers. Two start-up companies, Shopkick and Gowalla have already signed up to the service.

"Shopkick is bridging the mobile and physical retail words. We will use SpotRank to help retailers determine the best times to offer promotions, and consumers the hottest places to shop. SpotRank fits right in with our aspiration to dramatically improve the physical world shopping experience of consumers using mobile phones," said Cyriac Roeding, Co-founder and CEO of shopkick, which created the CauseWorld location-based shopping application.

"We're looking forward to diving into the SpotRank data from Skyhook. We believe this will provide us with a remarkable new way to let the Gowalla community know the hottest places nearby, at that very moment in time, as well as in the near future. It's an exciting technology and we believe it will enable us to serve up very interesting forms of local content," said Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla.