Placecast, a mobile advertising company known for its utilization of location-based “geofencing,” today issued a press release detailing why it thinks up to 40% of location data sets are incorrect, and how it’s new “MatchAPI” is helping to change it.
The company’s unique MatchAPI, put simply, is Placecast’s solution for cleaning and managing location-based data. It works by resolving the two most challenging problems of working with large location-based data sets. First, it disambiguates addresses by identifying all of the different ways to express the address of a location and verifying that those differing expressions refer to the same place.
Second, it maps all the relevant IDs from different content providers to that same place so that it’s always referred to correctly by any other system. According to the company, the system has already been “pressure-tested for scale,” citing that the MatchAPI has already been in place for more than a year and has already processed more than 20 million location records worldwide.
The solution is aimed squarely at mobile app developers and content providers- app developers that aggregate professional and user-generated location content from several sources can utilize the Placecast MatchAPI to simplify the process of de-duplicating and matching content listings — including business listings, reviews, check-ins, and events — to their true locations.
Likewise, the MatchAPI streamlines the process of matching venues to their customers’ or suppliers’ venue data for content providers. Placecast sees its MatchAPI as a free marketing tool that makes developers aware of premium content for their locations. By exposing venue IDs to developers, for example, providers can tap into new revenue streams by up-selling premium content and taking advantage of ad-based revenue models.
It’s a unique approach to a problem that will undoubtedly need to be dealt with soon, as location becomes a primary aspect to the mobile ecosystem. In the first 60 days of announcing the new MatchAPI, Placecast says that over 200 LBS-based companies have signed up, including WCities, Socialight, Buzzd and AlikeList.
“We have been using the real-time APIs for the past few weeks to integrate different data sources with our constantly evolving location data set,” says Fraser Campbell, CEO of premium content provider WCities. “We’re impressed with the MatchAPI functionality and how easy it is to use—it’s freeing up resources for us to focus on other areas of our business.”
