One of the questions I get asked quite often is: “Why is Local so difficult to innovate in?” or “Why do startups in the Local space generally fail?”

The main problem with any startup is lack of focus on a clear and defined vision.  In the local space, there are so many unclear opportunities and the monetization opportunities are so fragmented across thousands of small local businesses, that money is quickly spent on initiatives that don’t fit into a core vision.

We made a decision early on at Fwix to focus on geotagging content.  We toyed with the idea of building our own taxonomy or Places Database, and decided that such an initiative would distract us from the core vision of geotagging the web.  In our case, organizing content was enough for our team of 22 people and we made a decision to partner with another company to gain access to a quality Places Taxonomy.

For months, we looked at the databases out there: Foursquare, Gowalla, Localeze, SimpleGeo, Factual, and several other more “unheard of” sources of data.  We quickly realized that the space not only had several key players, but also several key weaknesses.  Data was either incomplete, malformed, or outdated in most cases.  It became clearer to us that the decision had to be made around a company that had the most innovative approach to creating a taxonomy.  We decided to partner with a company that was crawling the web and developing a taxonomy based on a myriad of sources rather than old-world methods of visiting and verifying local businesses/places.

Today, we’re proud to announce that we’re working with Factual as our baseline places database.

We believe that Factual’s approach to building a places database is both unique and versatile.  With this partnership, we are able to focus on our core vision of geotagging the web’s content and information while also providing our developers with a great Places Database that is open and free to use.

We’re committed to bringing an open and free local data platform to developers worldwide and this announcement is a major step towards that.

Thanks,

Darian
Founder, Fwix