New York: Skyhook Wireless, which makes software that shows smartphone users where they are on their phone’s maps, filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming Google had persuaded Motorola and another phone manufacturer to break contracts with Skyhook and use Google’s competing service.
In a separate suit, also filed Wednesday, Skyhook accused Google of infringing on Skyhook’s patented methods of determining location.
The two companies are fighting for the lead in the nascent but promising business of location-based data that uses GPS or Wi-Fi signals to locate phone users. These services not only direct people to businesses, but collect information about where people are. That is valuable information that lets marketers direct advertising to people where and when they are most likely to buy.
“People view it as the next frontier, the next place to get the attention of the consumer,” said Carl Howe, an analyst with Yankee Group, a technology research company. “It’s not big now, but we believe it to be the next consumer battleground.”
Skyhook’s interference suit against Google, filed in Massachusetts Superior Court in Suffolk County, accuses Google of intentionally disrupting Skyhook’s business relationships. It says Google has notified cellphone makers that they need to use Google’s location service as a condition of using Google’s Android smartphone operating system.
The complaint claims that Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president for engineering, gave Sanjay K. Jha, chief executive of Motorola’s mobile devices division, a “stop ship” order, preventing Motorola from shipping phones with the Android operating system using the Skyhook software, called XPS.
The complaint charges that the Skyhook software had already been tested by Motorola and had completed the Google approval process.
“It’s very hard to meet compliance when Google keeps moving the goal post,” said Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s chief executive, in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Google declined to comment. Motorola did not respond to requests for comment.
Skyhook, based in Boston, said that it had a nearly identical experience with a second company referred to only as “Company X” in the complaint. The suit said that Skyhook’s licensing agreement with Company X was announced July 2, the date Skyhook announced its agreement with Samsung Electronics. Samsung declined to comment.
In the patent suit, filed in Federal District Court in Massachusetts, Skyhook claims that Google violated four of Skyhook’s patents that gave it an advantage over competitors.
Competition to control location data is escalating because of the potential size of the market. “Regardless of how you calculate the number, the size of the opportunity is enormous,” said Alistair Goodman, chief of Placecast, a San Francisco location-based mobile marketing company.
Early research also shows mobile marketing to be highly effective at reaching consumers, said Mr. Goodman, whose company lets people sign up for alerts that appear on their phones when they are near the store of a client company or a site that company thinks will interest its customers.
“In aggregate, 65 percent of people in the programs made purchases, and 79 percent say the service was valuable,” Mr. Goodman said. “They didn’t see it as advertising or marketing.”
The value of the data surpasses the placing of ads on phones. It also allows companies to make inferences about a phone owner’s wealth, lifestyle and shopping preferences, which is also sought by marketers.
“We learn pretty interesting things, for instance who prefers Wal-Mart over Target, or Walgreens over CVS, who is split, which stores they will travel to get to,” said Thaddeus Fulford-Jones, chief of Locately, a location analytics company.