by Christof Hellmis, Matt Galligan, Justin Shaffer, Darian Shirazi and Tom Coates
Stores, Malls, Bars – there locations are facts. Not owned by anyone, but gathering that data and just as importantly keeping it accurate is expensive. What can a startup do? Can they depend on larger players’ APIs? Should they buy the data? Should they depend on their users? Or should companies pool together and just maintain one canonical database of places?