I was looking for a free service providing access to pubs/restaurants/commercial activities providing basicallylatitude,longitude and a string representing the commercial activity and this is my experience:

• Google Places: A LOT of places are missing!
• TripAdvisor: you have to fill a form and wait for their approval, based on their own criteria..I don’t think we can hope for their approval for a personal project and without any kind of commercial agreement.
• Facebook: probably very good, but you have to oblige the user of your app to login and checkin. And what if the user doesn’t have a Facebook account?
• FourSquare: Actually THE BEST I have found, you need to register your app to retrieve the app code to make queries. After that, you can perform a lot of queries WITHOUT asking the user to have a FourSquare account. You have access to a lot of commercial activities.

 

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