Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#51

Post by kochb » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:47 PM UTC

jaque wrote: post #3

so.. us addresses only?

Agreed, this is unusable for us until there's international support. We have a large percentage of international users in 130 different countries. Doesn't make sense to use this over, say, MapQuest.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#52

Post by untog » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:51 PM UTC

dougmccune wrote: post #46

For those looking to roll your own, the Ruby implementation of a TIGER geocoder released by GeoIQ a while back is a pretty solid starting point: https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/ We ended up using that as a base and then making some customizations for our US-based geocoding solution. As these guys are figuring out, there's no great int'l option. Google is bad from a licensing perspective (but their tech is fant…

Seconding the usefulness of that service - has worked well for me before now. Would be interested to know if this service is using it.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#53

Post by snake_plissken » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:54 PM UTC

Very cool. I'm in the telematics industry and forward geo-coding is something in which I am always interested, since it can be quite the bitch of a task. How did you go about assembling the shape files?

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#54

Post by chippy » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

dougmccune wrote: post #46

For those looking to roll your own, the Ruby implementation of a TIGER geocoder released by GeoIQ a while back is a pretty solid starting point: https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/ We ended up using that as a base and then making some customizations for our US-based geocoding solution. As these guys are figuring out, there's no great int'l option. Google is bad from a licensing perspective (but their tech is fant…

It's a very smart geocoder that one, have contributed to it - It is a bit old now and not that easy to get started with.

The state of the art of open source geocoder would be TwoFishes: https://github.com/foursquare/twofishes written in Scala and developed and used by FourSquare

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#55

Post by stfp » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 5:20 PM UTC

Congrats on the product! Just a couple website level things:

- http://geocod.io/contact/ says DC but shows me a map centered somewhere south of Topeka.

- Random $0.02 suggestion: stop using "ridiculous".

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#56

Post by dougmccune » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 5:23 PM UTC

chippy wrote: post #54

dougmccune wrote: post #46

For those looking to roll your own, the Ruby implementation of a TIGER geocoder released by GeoIQ a while back is a pretty solid starting point: https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/ We ended up using that as a base and then making some customizations for our US-based geocoding solution. As these guys are figuring out, there's no great int'l option. Google is bad from a licensing perspective (but their tech is fant…

It's a very smart geocoder that one, have contributed to it - It is a bit old now and not that easy to get started with. The state of the art of open source geocoder would be TwoFishes: https://github.com/foursquare/twofishes written in Scala and developed and used by FourSquare

sounds like twofishes doesn't do addresses, only city names. That puts it in a different category of product.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#57

Post by atlbeer » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 5:42 PM UTC

jrheard wrote: post #31

UI suggestion: 'street addresses' currently has a box around it, so I thought it was an field, thought "how cute", tried to click on it to enter an address to geocode, and was disappointed to find out it was just some bolded text. Might be a fun little feature to have that actually be an entry point into trying out a demo of the API (I thought I was supposed to enter an address to have geocoded).

Agreed. Did the same thing.

Would actually be neat though for that to be a quick demo of your software.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#58

Post by alepper » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 5:44 PM UTC

jsumrall wrote: post #10

Interesting. What interesting things can you do once you geocode a street address? How are you (your business) using this?

I used it to take a contact database for a series of seminars around the country and allocate participants to the geographically-appropriate venue.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#59

Post by appleflaxen » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 5:44 PM UTC

Your pricing page is not as clear as it could be.

When people read "$0.001 each" they sometimes understand it to be one thousandth of a cent rather than one thousandth of a dollar.

Even though you are completely correct/accurate, people find it confusing (1).

Wouldn't it be clearer to say "1 cent fore every ten uses" (or "10 calls for a cent" or "a tenth of a penny per call")?

Admittedly, your audience is semi-technical, and should parse it correctly, but why not simplify it?

[1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#60

Post by hydralist » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 5:47 PM UTC

next up, geofencing-as-a-service?