Wireless Week's Susan Rush reports today that Skyhook Wireless has expanded its Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) in the 100 largest cities in the U.S. Skyhook's goal is to cover 70 percent of the U.S. population by the end of the year.

"The company launched Loki last month, a customizable toolbar that turns a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop into a virtual GPS device, which can integrate that location into the user's Internet search, browsing and communications," Rush writes. "The Skyhook WPS platform is designed to automatically and accurately define a user's physical location."

In December of last year, Skyhook got $6.5 million in funding to expand throughout the U.S., as well as to push into Europe and Asia. The WPS system currently covers about 45 percent of the U.S. population.

"Skyhook's Wi-Fi positioning system is the world's largest Wi-Fi database of any kind," says company CEO Ted Morgan. "We have spent the past three years with the assistance of 150 dedicated data collection agents canvassing U.S. cities scanning for all the Wi-Fi access points in the neighborhoods of the largest metropolitan areas. With this information, software developers and device makers can tap into rapidly proliferating usage of Wi-Fi to bring to market a wide range of location-based services and applications."

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