PlanetEye

October 8th, 2008

Relevant GeoData

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

By now, people know that mobile phones can figure out your location. Most people also know that some of those mobile phones can do it faster than a GPS or even without a GPS.

Developers have embraced a variety of systems intended to acquire, centralize, broker, protect, use and reuse such location information but most users seem to be content with being a blue dot on a map. Even users without a mobile are going to be equipped with the tools to leverage their location information.

So what does PlanetEye make of the recent launch of Geode by Mozilla Labs?

It confirms that we are developing the right tools for how users will navigate the Web tomorrow. Regardless of which product ends up managing location on behalf of users, it is safe to assume that everyone will soon be capable of sharing this information.

It is to be expected that their information requirements will have location as one of the primary relevancy filters. And while this may transpire in many ways throughout other verticals we have devoted plenty of time to figure out how it will influence travel decisions.

The Food Finder demo developed by the Geode team is a good example of how obvious the solutions will be. There is no need to elaborate more than that. Maybe hint the Hotel Finder, Theatre Finder, etc.

But knowing your latitude and longitude is only the first step; aggregating a good collection of trusted, relevant Web sites; properly geocoding all their entries so they can be checked for proximity against the user request, organizing all nearby candidates in a hierarchy that properly reflects the user preferences, and, finally, doing this for every single request in under a second requires quite a bit of technology.

Fortunately, this is exactly what we’ve been working on for the last few months and we are ready to deliver relevant, personalized travel recommendations.

If you want some serious restaurant recommendations…

In San Francisco @ 37.79594, -122.40331 ? Bubble Lounge
In New York @ 40.76143, -73.98227 ? Le Bernardin

Or Discover destinations around the corner or across the world.

Technorati Tags: geode, mozilla, planeteye

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