With a new location-based service or application launching everyday it seems, it’s easy to forget the underlying foundation that powers these many solutions — precise location data.
SimpleGeo, a mobile location solutions provider that powers numerous mainstream applications and services, recently announced new product updates that aim to add more context and data about business locations. The new offerings are aptly named “SimpleGeo Places” and “SimpleGeo Context.”
The Context product gives developers “relevant contextual information such as geographic boundaries, weather, and demographics for a specific location,” wrote SimpleGeo designer Jeffrey Kalmikoff on the company blog, while SimpleGeo Places brings devs a detailed database of business listings and points of interest that “enables real-time community collaboration.” Surprisingly, both Places and Context “are now and will forever be completely free and without any restrictions,” the company said.
Likewise, Twitter recently announced that its expanded and enhanced the location layer of its Places API to make it easier for developers to interface with various datasets and offer better location-based experiences within their apps. At the heart of the update is the fact that Twitter now has more extensive information for finding tweets about places using the place operator in the Search API. This operator isn’t limited just to the Twitter Places data set. Rather, developers can also call up data sets from a variety of partners, including A&E Television Networks and History, Gowalla, OpenTable, TomTom, Yellow Pages Group (Canada) and Zagat.
This means that developers, using the data set alias for any of these providers, can access search information about a specific location quickly and painlessly, all while integrating multiple location data sets from a single location.
Mobile location is a central driver to mobile innovation in general and especially mobile advertising and marketing. As updates like these continue to emerge, the consumer-facing apps and services we all enjoy will only get better, more precise and more engaging.
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