The beauty of having data is once you know what to do with it, you can get it done fast.

So I spend a few hours whipping up a quick and easy mashup of restaurants + mapping. Basically pop in an address or move around the map, and it will show you the 30 closest restaurants.

I do want to add that the Explorer actually uses our own in-home geocoder solution (which we will be releasing ’soon’).

Of course, extending this to any other category/categories would take all of 5 minutes.

I plan on releasing the code so anyone can see how it was done … but right now, the conference is around the corner.

UPDATED: Just noticed it doesn’t always work in IE - some little JS bug. Will fix it later on. Try this link for now: restaurants near 91101. And if entering an address, click on ‘Center’ (dont press Enter).

Yeah yeah, it is just a quick prototype!