News

Boulder, Colorado — TIA is proud to announce its partnership with PublicEarth through the contribution of information covering tennis facilities to publicearth.com, a brand new website launched today. Through partnering with PublicEarth, TIA is introducing its tennis facilities information to a much larger audience, for the benefit of both TIA and consumers interested in tennis throughout the US.

PublicEarth is “the Wiki for Places,” and is dedicated to delivering interesting, unique and up-to-date place information in a personalized way. PublicEarth offers an ever-expanding database of nearly 5 million places, across 400 categories, and includes the TIA’s national database of more than 16,000 tennis facilities across the U.S. PublicEarth has more than tennis information with places such as scenic overlooks, biking paths, public art sites and more.

From PublicEarth.com, users with an interest in tennis can discover, create, add to and share places, and then through a unique and easy-to-use “device connector,” you can send these places to your GPS and mobile device. For tennis enthusiasts, PublicEarth is a tool to bring together their collective knowledge about interesting places. Plus, you can contribute to PublicEarth by adding photos, descriptions, and other interesting bits of information about your favorite tennis facilities, and other unique places.

PublicEarth has spent the last year working with numerous ‘special interest’ communities and organizations including TIA, providing features they requested, and helping them incorporate their specific information needs into the database. Their goals were to expose their unique content to a broader audience, and make it more accessible. For instance, PublicEarth offers simple widgets that allow communities and organizations to bring their content back to their own websites, but also add value by connecting it to complimentary and relevant nearby places.

Jolyn de Boer, TIA’s Executive Director, comments on the partnership, “Through PublicEarth, anyone looking for a place to play tennis, people to play with or programs to learn the game now has ready access to our growing database of more than 16,000 tennis facilities throughout the U.S. It’s a wonderful tool to help connect players—and potential players—with courts, facilities, programs and more.”

David Hose, the Chairman and CEO of PublicEarth and a long-time veteran of both geographic information systems and the mobile industry, saw a need for a comprehensive database of detailed long-tail information, and wanted to connect it systematically with more popular searches. Ultimately that data should flow to all of the worlds’ GPS devices, mobile phones and mapping applications.

“We knew that we had to launch with a sizable database. But we also knew that the millions of places we have right now make up less than 1% of the mapable places in the world. So we are providing easy to use tools that allow anyone to add places that they find interesting or important,” says Hose, “It will take time to be anywhere close to complete, but we have a remarkable start.”