Places API Update, January 2021

By Chris Winfield

Welcome to our first update of 2021, where we'll be setting out our product and company vision.

As we build Swiftcomplete, it's really important to understand where we can make a difference and where we should focus our energy, and we do this by working towards a product and company vision.

I'm really excited about the results from our latest round of R&D, and in this short post I'll share our key areas of focus for the rest of the year.

Technology

Our product vision is to "Instantly find any place, anywhere", and with that in mind our first focus area is "Technology".

So far, we've researched and developed the key components of our brand-new location search platform, and this year we'll build on this initial research and roll out our fully-automated, highly-scalable location search API, capable of handling hundreds of thousands of searches per second.

Automation, efficiency and rapid scalability are key to supporting the growth of the world's fastest growing businesses without breaking the bank. We've developed our search engine from scratch to be ultra efficient, so that we can deliver an amazing user experience and scale at a fraction of the time and cost of hosting alternative search engines and databases like Elasticsearch or SQL.

Data

We know that we have the capability to create the best location searching in the world, but we can only get so far without including the best available data.

So far, the Places API uses open data that we've standardised to provide a great base-level of coverage, but open data isn't detailed enough to provide the user experience and accuracy that we're looking for.

We'll continue to source more open data for use in the Places API, but this year we'll also begin working with leading data providers from around the world so that you have the option of accessing the best available data.

People

Our final focus area is "People".

This year, I'm really keen to grow the Swiftcomplete team and work with like-minded people who are excited about being a part of building next-generation technology.

As we move out of lockdown, I'll be looking to not only build the team internally, but attend and speak at tech meetups and possibly start a new "startup meetup" too.