I bought a rather large geocode database for Canada and the USA for FanConcert. It allows me to take a postal or zip code and get back all sorts of useful information like: country, province, city, approximate latitude and longitude, area code, time zone, etc.

Since I introduced the geocode database the number of Venues has quadrupled in a week. More venues is a good thing because a concert attached to a venue has a GPS location (lat/long) that I can compare against the user's GPS location to see if it's close.

Speaking of the user's location -- I can use their postal code/zip to approximate their location as well. So users don't have to worry about finding their lat/long either and that's a big usability win. If most users don't have to deal directly with GPS coordinates, that's good.

This stuff actually went into FanConcert a week ago but I'm letting people on the mailing list find any early problems before I announce new FanConcert features on this blog. If you'd like to be on FanConcert's bleeding edge you should join the mailing list.

Thanks to everyone for your support!