We are all excited about what we can do on cell phones (and especially the iphone) making use of location information. It’s surprising though how little use is made at web sites today of the already available geo information. There are many different vendors (MaxMind, Quova, Ip2Location, Geobytes, …) that provide databases of IP address blocks either for download or as a web service. It’s true that these are not 100% accurate, but for many applications they could provide significant value for little cost. For instance, country level data is available for free from some services (at slightly degraded quality) and at good quality is available starting at $50/year (including monthly updates). For multi-lingual sites that’s a good starting point to greet a visitor in the correct language. There should also be no reason that folks have to manually select their country for shopping checkouts (obviously, need to have an override if the info is wrong) . Community sites should look at a higher level of resolution, with zip code level data available starting at $500/year. Again, it’s easy for a user to adjust their zip code if it’s incorrect, but presenting visitors with community members or relevant content from nearby is a great way of drawing them in.
