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Tools of the CityGrid Los Angeles Hackathon

by on 04/25/2012

We have a pretty awesome line-up of tools, platforms and APIs for people to use when building their local web and mobile apps this weekend at the CityGrid Los Angeles Hackathon: 3Scale (@3Scale) - A Plug & Play Cloud based API Management Infrastructure for Developers, Startups, SMBs and Enterprises to securely open, control, manage and monetize their API to 3rd parties. CityGrid (@CityGridAPITeam) - Places, offers, reviews APIs and mobile, web and custom advertising with places that pay. CloudyRec (@Cloudyrec) - CloudyRec is a mobile app scaffolding engine with integrated Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS).... read more.

Tags: 3Scale, CityGrid, Factual, GeoCoda, Hackathon, IPGP, Iron.io, Jeppesen, Los Angeles, Socrata, Spire.io, Tiggzi, Verious

Turn Your Wordpress Blog into Mobile City Guide

by on 04/09/2012

I'm always on the lookout for tools that CityGrid publishers can use alongside the web and mobile apps they've built using CityGrid Places and Advertising APIs. Today I came across a cool Wordpress plugin over at WP Mayor, a site for WordPress news, articles, hacks and plugin reviews, that turns your local blog into an iPhone enabled city guide, called Placeling. To get started, Placeling provides an iPhone app that allows you to mark places that you've been, which will provide the reference for blog posts that you write later.  Next you install and activate the Placeling plugin in your Worpress site.... read more.

Tags: CityGrid, Hyperlocal, iPhone, Local, Mobile, Placeling, Wordpress

Business Directory for your Local Wordpress Blog or Site

by on 02/28/2012

I finished the first version of a business directory WordPress plugin that you can use to deploy a local directory for your Wordpress site or blog. I wanted to make an easy way for non-developers, to launch a local directory for one or multiple business categories. The Hyp3rL0cal Wordpress Plugin uses two APIs: CityGrid Places API CityGrid Advertising API To install the CityGrid Hyp3rL0cal Wordpress Plugin you have two options: Search for it and install using the Plugin Search in your Wordpress site (this is the easiest). Download it from the Wordpress plugin directory or via Github, and upload using the "plugin upload" in yourWordpress site.... read more.

Tags: Business, City, CityGrid, Directory, Local, Places, Plugin, Wordpress

The Trouble with Local-Mobile-Social Search

by on 02/26/2012

I live on the road. Every week, I'm in a different city or new neighborhood, looking for new places to eat, drink, work, sleep and so on. As such, I typically turn to my iPhone for guides and recommendations. The main apps I use for this: Yelp and Foursquare. But neither does the job at all well. Over the last few days (I'm in San Francisco currently), I've struggled to find good breakfast, lunch, and beer joints. Let's use the search for a good beer as an example: Friday night, I wanted to find a bar within a 10 minute walk of my hotel (so there was a geolocation element to my search). I wanted to know if the place would be tolerable on a Friday night (as in, not too crowded, not too loud, no cover charge, etc).... read more.

Tags: Beer, Foursquare, Local, Mobile, Social, Tech Gypsies

Hyp3r0cal for Wordpress

by on 02/19/2012

I wanted a way to make the rich content available via CityGrid APIs accessible to anyone, even if you weren't a developer. CityGrid has some great iOS and Android software development kits (SDK) available for building local, mobile applications. I've also built some samples and starter kits for building local web applications in PHP, Python and Ruby. WordPress seemed like the perfect next step to reach a larger audience, so I took the PHP Hyp3rL0cal directory that uses CityGrid Places API, and deployed it as a Wordpress Plugin. Now you can launch a quick section on your Wordpress blog or site that allows you to display businesses for your area, in whatever category you wish.... read more.

Tags: Business, CityGrid, Details, Listings, Local, Places, Search, Wordpress

SEO Friendly, Static Local Directory Without Caching Data

by on 02/06/2012

I’m working on several prototypes for building CityGrid local directories, demonstrating best practices when building web and mobile apps using CityGrid APIs. One question I’ve gotten a lot lately is how are developers supposed to build SEO friendly local directories with static pages if they aren’t allowed to cache businesses and places from the CityGrid API? It is true, per the CityGrid Usage Requirements, you aren’t allowed to store places data in a local database or cache locally. But if you think about this, it isn’t a negative, its a positive.... read more.

Tags: Bing, Google, Local Directory, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Yahoo

What is Social in Local, Mobile, Social?

by on 02/06/2012

I am working to define a CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social stack, to help CityGrid developers more efficiently build web and mobile apps. This definition will contain APIs, tools, platforms and other data sets that can be used along with CityGrid Places, Offers, Reviews and Advertising. I’m working my way through a bunch of tools and APIs for the local and mobile portion of the stack, but I find myself spinning when I’m trying to define the “social”. Obviously providing information on using the primary social networks in your apps is important: Facebook Social Graph API Twitter API Google+ API Foursquare API But where do we go next with social in our local mobile applications?... read more.

Tags: Facebook, Foursquare, Google+, Local, Mobile, Social, Twitter

New York City Open Data Highlight: Restaurant Inspection Results

by on 02/06/2012

The amount of open data available right now can be dizzying and overwhelming. When looking through various data repositories and data marketplaces, I am trying to identify open data sets from various cities that may be of use to CityGrid developers. As I find data sets, that can add value to your web and mobile apps I will highlight here on the blog. Today’s highlighted data set is from NYC Open Data, and provides a complete set of restaurant inspection results for New York City. When your users are looking for restaurants, while using your applications, it seems that knowing the restaurants latest inspection grade would be useful information in making a decision where to eat.... read more.

Tags: Data, Inspection, New York City, Restaurant

CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack: Geoloqi

by on 02/06/2012

In February I’m spending more time building, what I’ve dubbed the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack, a list of APIs, platforms and tools that you can use in your local-mobile applications. Of course CityGrid Places, Offers, Reviews and Advertising are first in that stack, but I want to identify other APIs, tools and platforms that can also assist you in quickly building your mobile app. As I add items to this stack. I will showcase them one by one here on the blog.... read more.

Tags: Geoloqi, Local, Messaging, Mobile, Social, Tracking

Local Directory vs Local Guide

by on 02/01/2012

When I started working with the CityGrid Places API I needed a project to help me learning about how to use the API, and wrap my head around whats possible when building local web applications. I built Hyp3rL0cal which is a local web directory, that I wrote in PHP, then created Python and Ruby versions as well. While I think local directories are still a very valuable and relevant part of the CityGrid network, I do not think they reflect the future of local web applications. So I”m spending time trying to brainstorm what is next, and I want to explore the difference between a local directory and local guide.... read more.

Tags: Data, Guide, Hipmunk, Local, Places


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