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

6 points by koudo ↗ HN
I am curious as I am just starting to learn about geocode, geolocation etc.

6 comments

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There are services that can provide this data such as Teleatlas.
It's seemingly crowdsourced. You can just click "Create Venue"...
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...

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