Tesco’s troubles and reverse geocoding
Tesco’s troubles and reverse geocoding
Talk about coincidence. Just as I was about to share a couple of numbers from our geocoding traffic report, someone sent me a link to an interesting read by Nick Lansley of Tesco. In a nutshell, he, as well as dozens (hundreds?) of other iPhone developers have suddenly found themselves cut off from Google geocoding. Read more here.
Back to our latest traffic report. I thought it was interesting enough to share some of it with everyone. While it is expected that all of our products show usage growth over time, the usage of geocoding has simply skyrocketed lately. According to our traffic report, the number of geocoding requests has increased more than ten-fold over the last four weeks, without any sign that the trend is changing. I am also quite impressed by adoption of version 2 of our geocoding API. Given that most requests come from mobile applications that have necessarily longer update cycles, the new API’s 30% share of traffic in only three weeks is really a large number. The most popular request type? Reverse geocoding.
In the meantime, we’ve been working on better support for EU-style addressing, which will be available real soon. Also in the works, fast and accurate US addressing which will be brought online by the end of next month. More to come…
Tesco’s troubles and reverse geocodingOctober 30th, 2009 - Posted by in api, cloudmade, iPhone, products | | 2 Comments
on October 30th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I have been using the Cloudmade’s routing service which is great because it allows us to offer a ncie service on top of OSM and also to find possible errors in the data.
But we had to implement our own namefinder because the geocoder is not helpful for Eastern Europe countries (at least), due to the fact that it gives different results if the search has (or not) special characters like diacritics. Seems like issue 83 http://developers.cloudmade.com/issues/show/83 was created for this. Hopefully this will be implemented soon.
on November 2nd, 2009 at 5:30 am
Firefox 3.6 has extended the geolocation API’s position interface to do reverse geocoding in the browser. From lat/lng points it can get an approximate address very powerful stuff https://developer.mozilla.org/en/nsIDOMGeoPositionAddress