September 23, 2010
New! Placecast LocalBox™
Today Placecast previewed a new offering - LocalBox™ - which is currently in private beta. As the name implies, this location-in-a-box functionality is a white-label toolset for OEM’s carriers and app developer communities to deploy location-based offerings at scale without writing any new code.
You can watch a demo of LocalBox here:
The key pieces of location functionality include local search and discovery, venue pages, real-time social information about a place like Foursqure check-ins and Tweets, coupons, in-app notifications, and utilities like transit information, traffic and weather.
What we think is most interesting about LocalBox™, is what’s called a location data crosswalk, and this is actually a hard problem that we’ve solved. Basically, what we’re able to do is pull in point of interest data from many different sources, clean up the duplicates, erroneous listings, and different expressions of this place, and normalize them all to a single, correct location… and do all of this in real-time.
One of the challenges many in the location-based space deal with every day is that location data is often incorrect, and location data services all have different reference schemes for their data… which makes it difficult for them to communicate with each other about a place. What you are seeing here is clean, verified data, aggregated from multiple location sources in real time – and the tools to monetize, all “in a box.”
