Mobile Location Based Services are on the rise. After several false starts back in the mid 2000s, every mobile user now depends on their phones to tell them where they are, where their friends are, and to engage with social media like Facebook and Foursquare. A report by Juniper Research suggests this market is expected to breach over $12 billion next year, where it hardly existed a few years ago at all.
This is in part because mobile apps have become ubiquitous now. In order to remain relevant, businesses need to interact socially and have a web store to remain accessible to their wandering customers.
Building a geographically aware application from scratch sounds daunting and like a lot of initial data setup. It doesn’t have to be. Products like vFabric Postgres (vPostgres) can be used along with the PostGIS extensions to perform geographic-style queries. Then, public data and an open source visualizer can be used to transform the query into a meaningful result for your application or end user.