Do you think there’s a lot of data on the Internet? Imagine how much there is in the offline world: 510 million square kilometers of land, 6.79 billion people, 18 million kilometers of paved roads, and countless objects inhabit the Earth. The most exciting thing about all this data? Technologists are now starting to chart and index the offline world, down to street signs and basketball hoops.
For the past decade, social technologies such as Meetup and Match.com have used the web to help people connect in person. Cheap geolocation technology in cellphones over the past few years gave rise to apps that connect people with physical places. As developers build rich layers of information atop location data, our understanding of the world is changing. Foursquare is the tip of the iceberg.
The new wave of hyper local data is surging. Here’s how it’s going down.
Step 1: Location-Based Infrastructure
At SXSWi 2011, Internet luminary, publisher and media thinker Tim O’Reilly called President Ronald Reagan “the Father of Foursquare.” That’s because in the 1980s when the U.S. government launched its global positioning satellite network into space, Reagan pushed to allow anyone access to the data.
At the time, laypeople weren’t generally interested in spending thousands of dollars on GPS receivers. Fast forward a couple of decades to the iPhone, complete with cheap, built-in GPS receiver, and tinkerers such as Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai from Foursquare, Josh Williams from Gowalla, and Sam Altman from Loopt were creating social networks based on GPS. Incidentally, these networks began indexing and categorizing places in the real world, sending digitized information about them into the cloud and back down into people’s...
