Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - February 15th, 2012

Kin Lane
Written by

The best of the blog posts and tweets from Localeze, Acxiom, InfoGroup, Verizon, YPG.com, Yahoo GeoPlanet, Foursquare, Facebook, Google Places, Google Mobile Ads, Google Geo, Simple Geo, Factual, Yelp, Fwix, Infochimps, PlacesIQ, HyperPublic and Placecast for the week. In an effort to keep track of whats going on in the local and geo landscape I track on all of the tweets and blog posts from these providers.

From the Foursquare Blog

  • Quick Tip: Finding last minute flowers, treats, and date night spots! - (02/14/2012) - Explore on your phoneto find the nearest chocolates, flowers, or cupcakes on the way to your date tonight. (Try searching cozy, romantic, or delicious if youre still looking for a place to go! ) Good luck!
  • Quick Tip: Find the address in a snap (and some recommendations while youre at it) - (02/13/2012) - If youre using Google Chromeas your browser, you can get super speedy results with this keyboard shortcut trick: 1) Type foursquare. com into the address bar and hit the tab key 2) Type the name of the place and hit enter! Well show you our search results page, including addresses. Click through to see a map, recommendations, photos, and even the menu if the theyve provided the info. Still need to pick a spot? Use foursquare. com/explore to find tons of personalized recommendations for whatever youre craving, based on what you and your friends like.
  • Sculpture gardens, scenic lookouts, sugary confections planning your Valentines Day with foursquare! - (02/10/2012) - Planning a day date for the weekend? Check out these lists of romantic parks inNorth Carolinaand New York. From planetariums to sculpture parks, this list has romantic spotsacross the country. Who says Valentines Day is for couples only? Browse lists from for fun places to go alone or with your friends in DC, Boston, and New York. Check out these performance venues in Houstonor The Corcoran Groupsrecommendations for theaters and showsin New York. Dont forget to buy tickets! Looking for love? Take some tips from Bravos Millionaire Matchmaker and her suggestions for the perfect datein New Jersey and New York. Make plans to see some of the breathtaking viewsfrom around the world!
  • How colleges make the world better with foursquare! - (02/09/2012) - The University of Toledo leaves tipsaround campus to let students know where to find all the recycling bins (no more pizza box graveyards in students dorm rooms! ). For their Sustainability Week activities (how awesome is it that they have that? ), the University at Albany-SUNYrewardedstudents and faculty with 10 campus dollars for leaving tips about sustainability for others to discover. For a recent food drive, George Mason Universitycreated a foursquarelistof all the participating drop-off locations accepting canned food, so students all over campus knew where to take their donations. At the University of North Alabama (Go Lions!
  • Finding places on the go has never been easier check out the new Explore for your phone! - (02/08/2012) - Today, were launching an updated version of Explore for iPhoneand Android, bringing over a bunch of the great features from our recent Explore on the weblaunch straight to your phone, like changing your location, filtering your recommendations, and photos in your search results! Get ready for personalized recommendations for whatever youre craving, wherever and whenever you need them! Smarter searching Every time you search with Explore, well show you results based on the time of day, places your friends have been or left tips, places on lists you follow, and places we think youll like based on the 1,500,000,000 check-ins on foursquare.
  • City badge winners announced! #visitUS - (02/08/2012) - governors promoted, and celebrity chefstweeted, but in the end, only three cities could win their very own badge. Actually, there were so many awesome lists, we picked five (and it was so hard to narrow it down that far)! Here they are: Baltimore, Maryland With retweets from themayor, the governor, thelieutenant governor, The Good Wifestar Josh Charles, Charm City Cakes, and their Ace of Cakesstar Duff Goldman,Visit Baltimorewon the follower count category with over 1000 followers! Check out their amazing list, featuring everything from the best Thursday night karaoke bar, to the uncanny Frank Zappa Statue. Richmond, Virginia Richmond is for lovers!

From the Facebook Blog

  • Early Success Stories: Timeline Apps and Open Graph - (02/15/2012) - img. border { border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #CCCCCC;} There should be an app for everyone on Facebook, and people are quickly starting to use the apps you build to experience all of the things they love shopping, reading books, eating and traveling with their friends. A few weeks ago, more than 60 new timeline apps went live. These apps - many in the lifestyle category - broadened what was available to people on Facebook beyond the music, news and video apps that were introduced at f8 in September. Music apps like Spotify, Songza and Deezer are seeing dramatic increases in sharing and music discovery.
  • Announcing The Facebook Mobile Platform Global Hacks Roadshow- Europe - (02/13/2012) - In October, we announced the Facebook Mobile Platform, bringing social channels and distribution to mobile apps. Since then, momentum has been building, and today, more than 60 million visitors interact with apps and games on the platform every month. In October we also invited mobile developers to join us for a Mobile Hack in Palo Alto. We later visited mobile developers in New York and Boston to hold similar events. Hundreds joined us at each event, learned about the Facebook Mobile Platform, worked on mobile hack projects, and presented them to panels of VCs and tech executives. We were thrilled that these mobile hack events attracted developers from around the world, from as far afield as London, Israel and Brazil.
  • Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love - (02/10/2012) - This week, we posted blogs on Creating Featured Stories with Action Specs and Developer Blog Subscriptions. Additionally, we invited developers to come talk to us at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco in March. Open Graph "Read" Built-in Action Available in DevApp This week we enabled the built-in Read action in the Open Graph Tool. Like the Watch action or any custom action, you will still have to submit this action for review before you can go live. Please check out the documentation and requirements for Built-in Action Types. New: Best Practices This week we published our first product guide, "Guide: Complete the loop to grow your app with Open Graph.
  • Payments update - (02/10/2012) - We have a few updates for developers using Payments on Facebook Platform, including updates to the Pay Dialog, payout reports as well as new payer promotions. New Payer Promotions Facebook has begun sponsoring promotions to help developers convert game players into paying users. We are currently running an offer to encourage game players to make a first-time purchase using their credit card or PayPal account. This offers allows the user to earn $4 of value for free by purchasing 10 Facebook Credits at the regular price of $1. Users outside the US will see the same offer expressed in their local currency. There are two versions of this offer currently running on the platform.
  • Developer Blog Subscriptions - (02/08/2012) - We recently launched the ability to manage your email subscriptions on the Developer Site: A month ago, we discovered a bug in our Developer Blog email subscriptions that prevented posts from getting emailed. We fixed this bug today and sent out all posts that were never delivered. This ensured that you didn't miss any important announcements (some posts dated back to mid-January). We apologize for sending the emails all at once and any confusion that this may have caused. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

 

From the Google Geo Developers Blog

  • Fab Friday: Three Quick Links - (02/10/2012) - Google Vector Layers: Google Vector Layers allows you to easily add one or more vector layers from a number of different geo web services to a Google Maps API based application.
  • Debugging KML Balloon Content in Google Earth - (02/09/2012) - KML Balloons in Google Earth - starting with version 5. 0 - support HTML, CSS, and almost full JavaScript.

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From the InfoChimps Blog

  • Infochimps at Strata Conference 2012 - (02/10/2012) - We’re excited to have our CTO, Flip Kromer presenting a talk at Strata Conference in Santa Clara later this month. The discussion centers arounddisambiguation. Now you might be wondering… what is disambiguation? Simply put, disambiguation is the process of resolving conflicts to remove ambiguity. We’ve discussed this topic a number of times in this blog and Flip will be presenting on how this concept affects the way we ask questions and find answers about Big Data. For more details on the talk, check out the Strata schedule.

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