Posts Tagged ‘trends’

Twitter and FourSquare leverage geolocation (TechCrunch)

Friday, March 19th, 2010

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[Editor’s note: In time for SXSW last week, Twitter turned on geolocation (showing where a tweet was sent from along with the tweet) on their site. FourSquare, a popular check-in app, has opened up their API so developers could make use of their user’s firehouse, as well.]

Republished from TechCrunch.

There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more.

Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt).

As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending.

SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still.

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Top GPS Searches and Places (Telenav)

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

[Editor’s note: Interesting results from one of the in-car GPS companies. Food, businesses, states, and cities. Pizza, Walmart top the lists. Washington DC makes the top 10 list for metro cities. LA and DC rank tops for rerouting around traffic (those metros top for worst traffic in the US, so no surprise there).]

Republished from TeleNav.

Pizza, Los Angeles, and Walmart – Any ideas what the three words have in common? Think about it and we’ll come back to it.

Life is busy. Very busy. Whether you have to rush to pick the kids up after soccer practice or zip to your next meeting, we know getting where you have to go with the least amount of hassle is important to you. And that’s where we come in.

They’re all at the top of a list.

  • The most preferred food of the TeleNav user on the move? You guessed it – pizza. This is based on search data from December 2009. Also on the list Chinese food, hamburgers, American food, and Mexican food. No word on whether New York or Chicago-style is preferred.

Continue reading at TeleNav . . .

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New Programs Put Crime Stats on the Map (Wall Street Journal)

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

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[Editor’s note: Instead of screen scrapping police logs printed in community papers, web mappers are partnering directly with city police departments to get timely, accurate reports up online in map form. Thanks Yifang!]

Republished from the Wall Street Journal.
June 3, 2009. By BOBBY WHITE

When a burglar broke into a home on the outskirts of Riverdale Park, Md., last month, some locals quickly received an email alert about the incident. Once police confirmed the crime on the scene, they followed
up with a more thorough email disclosing the time, location and type of crime.

The alert is part of a crime-information service that the Riverdale Park police department provides its residents about illegal activity in their neighborhoods. “It helps us keep the public informed,” says Teresa Chambers, police chief of Riverdale Park, a suburb of Washington, D.C. “It’s also a way for us to solicit help [from residents] in solving some of these crimes.”

Across the country, Americans can increasingly track crime trends block by block as more police departments contract with Internet-based crime-mapping services. Since 2007, more than 800 police departments have begun working with Web sites like CrimeMapping.com, CrimeReports.com and EveryBlock.com. The services take live feeds from police record-keeping systems and automatically post the data on their sites.

Police say they use the sites to help change citizens’ behavior toward crime and encourage dialogue with communities so that more people might offer tips or leads. Some of the sites have crime-report blogs that examine activity in different locales. They also allow residents to offer tips and report crimes under way.

Police have traditionally depended on media reports and community meetings to inform the public about neighborhood crime. Many departments have been reluctant to share too much information with the public out of concern it could be used as a political tool, says Thomas Casady, police chief of Lincoln, Neb. But the rise of Web services that publish records online has forced some of the departments to reconsider. Some of these sites operate independently of the police department, putting pressure on police to participate, Mr. Casady says.

Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal . . .

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