For those wondering, Skyhook is a "location technology company" that was acquired by Qualcomm
Also:
> In 2016, Skyhook introduced a range of innovative [sic] products tailored for the advertising technology sector: Retailer Personas, Power Personas, and On-Demand Personas. Leveraging Skyhook's vast processing capabilities handling billions of location data points, these solutions empower marketers to finely tune consumer targeting by analyzing past locations, enabling personalized mobile marketing campaigns.
Lovely.
I know that they sued Google over their Android NLP implementation and Google lost on almost all of the enumerated complaints, Apple started using Skyhook beginning with early versions of iOS, and Microsoft apparently also uses them.
What they have seemingly done with the assistance of an absurd number of patents that they apparently keep getting granted by the USPTO (which is known for issuing boatloads of junk patents), is take a fairly obvious tactic which amounts to one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing - the WiFi "wardriving" practice - and find ways to patent-encumber that technique that they did not invent until they have engineered what appears to be a complete monopoly on it.
I'm also curious how the legal landscape of that business may have changed after the Qualcomm acquisition. IIRC at one point in time Qualcomm was licensing Skyhook data.