We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about consumer facing geolocation services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, and not as much time talking about the data and service plumbing that makes these services work.
But the location based infrastructure landscape is getting pretty interesting as well. Yesterday, Location Labs (formerly known as Wavemarket), hinted that they might be gearing up for an IPO. Not that long ago, SimpleGEO (see our interview) was able to raise a pretty big chunk of money to “sell shovels” to the start-ups digging for geolocation gold. And before that, GeoAPI was snapped up by Twitter to power that company’s in house location infrastructure.
Today Yahoo! put a bit more spit and polish on its own legacy geocoding tools and relaunched them as Yahoo! Placefinder.
Here is what you need to know:
At its most basic level, Yahoo! Placefinder is a location based look up service that allows developers to query, for example, the lat long of a particular address. The service also provides what’s known as “reverse geocoding,” which means that it will take a stab at providing you an address if you give them a lat long.
Where the service gets more interesting in my opinion is what it provides in terms of Points of Interest. For example, you can send them a name of a park, or of a baseball stadium, or of a tourist attraction, and get back lat long information. Why does this matter? Because using this sort of service could help any of the thousands of travel web sites convert their travel directories to location based services.
With these big company APIs, the devil is often in the details. Yahoo’s restrictions don’t look too bad so far – you can send up to 50K queries per day to their service, and I didn’t see any restrictions that would make these APIs for “non-commercial applications” only. While 50K daily queries won’t be enough for some of the larger databases of places out there, it is certainly enough to service aspiring geolocation service providers a bit farther down the tail.
Keep an eye on these services: SimpleGeo, Location Labs, Skyhook, Yahoo! Placefinder, OVI Maps, Google Maps – and even some of the legacy data providers like Acxiom, InfoUSA, and Localeze. As the geolocation tools and data gets better, so will the apps.
NakdReality offers a points of interest service similar to SimpleGeo’s, but is open source.
Howdy, Lawrence-
We heart plumbing, as at Quova, its all about powering the infrastructure of “Geo”. You probably recall our mention of our partnership to supply SimpleGeo with IP geolocation data last week at SF New Tech? Was nice to see you there.
-LaurieAnne (LA)
LA, I should have mentioned Quova in this post. Sometimes I’m spacey like that – let’s catch up so I can dig in to what you guys are up to.
Philip, thanks for the heads up, will check NakdReality out.
Make your own life easier get the business loans and everything you want.
Who will this really benefit, and how will it be used?
I work for an agency that does lots of map verification, esp w/Google. Is there a bulk upload to use, or is this just a behind the scenes coding/programing feature that users and searchers will never really see or use?
While Placefinder is apparently available for commercial applications, the Yahoo Map API Terms of Service seems to prevent any usage that doesn’t involve displaying a Yahoo Map:
“YOU SHALL NOT: …
(viii) store or allow end users to store map imagery, map data or geocoded location information from the Yahoo! Maps APIs for any future use;
(ix) use the stand-alone geocoder for any use other than displaying Yahoo! Maps or displaying points on Yahoo! Maps;
“