New Toolkit Part of Larger Fwix Strategy to Organize World’s Information by Location
SAN FRANCISCO, CA– Fwix, the local information company, announced today the launch of its new API, the first holistic, open and free places database. The API is available today at developers.fwix.com.
Fwix is one of the fastest-growing local data companies in the world, serving more than eight million API calls per day prior to today’s launch. The new Fwix API is built on three tenets — places, content and money — and gives both developers and publishers a central hub of robust location-based data. By organizing the world’s information by location, Fwix is geotagging the entire web and mapping all content — including news, blogs, social/mobile activity, events, reviews, photos and video — to its latitude and longitude.
The new Fwix developer platform then gives developers and publishers the ability to retrieve a Fwix Places Taxonomy, with baseline places data provided in part by Factual, and fetch any type of content that Fwix has geotagged to a place or location. In addition to fetching this robust set of geo-data, developers can write back data — making Fwix an open platform. This combination of place and content is then met with access to Fwix’s high-quality local advertising network. The full pipeline is being released today for public use.
"Location is a huge part of contextual relevance. By indexing data on the web by latitude and longitude, and through our new API, we can provide everyone with real-time geo-data and information of what is happening at a given location," said Darian Shirazi, CEO and founder of Fwix. "This is one of the biggest opportunities on the web today, and contextual relevance is the future of information discovery. For us, this effort centers around location."
Shirazi will address the technological challenges and successes of open places data at the 2011 Where 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
Fwix is currently operating in 7 countries, 61,000 cities, and defined down to 87,000 neighborhoods in the U.S. alone. A number of media publishers have partnered with Fwix to use its platform, including NBCU, AT&T Interactive, the New York Times Company, and more.
About Fwix
Fwix is a local information company that organizes the world’s information by location. Fwix is the largest local content curator and a geo-data platform for developers and media publishers, providing highly relevant local content across news, places data, media and more. Fwix provides developers a robust API to build powerful geo-enabled applications and mobile apps for users to tap into what’s happening nearby. For more information, go to www.fwix.com.