Booyah’s MyTown, fresh off its $20M round of funding, announced yesterday at Google I/O that its partnered with the search giant to access its newly minted “Places Web Service” feature, which can offer up over 50 million locations around the world.
MyTown, which bills itself a leader in “real-world interactive entertainment,” will use the treasure-trove of location data to enhance its presence internationally, as well as extend its functionality away from solely a virtual gaming app to more of a social utility app that’s better positioned to take on competition in the space.
The Places Web Service is a new feature of the Google Maps API, which returns the 20 most popular places near a given location. It helps to generate suggestions of businesses or points of interest that represents a user’s current location and provides relevant details about those places.
This could be a solid source of revenue using some creative thinking on behalf of Booyah. “MyTown could eventually funnel real world offers and coupons from Google through the API,” CEO Keith Lee said today. This would likely result in significant revenue for Booyah or any other LBS app.
Booyah likely wont be the only game in town utilizing Google’s Places API, so it should be interesting to see what the other players do when they get their hands on it.
