Ask HN: How do sites like Foursquare/Gowalla obtain db of geolocation/business?

6 points·koudo··6 comments

I am curious as I am just starting to learn about geocode, geolocation etc.

I'm pretty sure both of them were seeded by crowdsourcing..

One good trick is to tap into the Google AJAX API, there is also SimpleGeo, but its more meant as a method to push your checkins to, than being a datasource of business geo listings

Also, this just came out but I'm not sure if it does what you need: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/placecast-debuts-all-in-one...

I'm eagerly awaiting the day there is a very simple reliable worldwide API that I can punch in "Steves BBQ, Podunk, NY USA" and it gives me geocoords, an address, phone #, hours etc. If such a thing now exists, love to hear about it...

I think the crowdsourcing portion keeps the list updated, but the initial list seems to have rolled out too quickly to have been crowdsourced

http://simplegeo.com/ would be a good place to start... we used it on http://www.foundtown.com for some stuff

So you were able to tap into SimpleGeo for business listings?

I was under the impression their business data layer wasn't that useful for something like looking up a business by name/location and getting the geocoords, name & address etc. Like it is mostly for keeping track of your own geo records, right? But I haven't looked at it in a while...

There are services that can provide this data such as Teleatlas.

It's seemingly crowdsourced. You can just click "Create Venue"...

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