Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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The Map Business

The other day I wrote about what it likes to build Google Maps and this week I read that Foursquare has switched off Google’s map service (apparently they’re starting to charge businesses who use it). It’s interesting to think that just a few years ago there was no such thing as a map API service business and now Foursquare is writing this:

When we initially began looking around for other map providers, we found some incredibly strong alternatives. And while the new Google Maps API pricing was the reason we initially started looking into other solutions, we ultimately ended up switching because, after all our research and testing, OpenStreetMap and MapBox was simply the best fit for us.

March 1, 2012 // This post is about: , ,