My Blog of Japan Japan!

Starbucks in Japan

Here’s a project I worked on, then forgot about. I used a screen scraper written in PHP to grab all the Starbucks locations in Japan to make a map. I wrote a batch geocoder to run the address results through Google Maps geocoder and recorded the latitude and longitude of each one.

With Japanese addresses, you [...]

Google Maps Japan vs. Google Maps US

Using Google Maps to do geocoding of addresses in Japan and the US gives back much different results. Geocoding is when you ask Google Maps for information about an address. For example, you could search for “Empire State Building” and get back the address “Empire State Building, New York, NY 10001, USA” along with it’s [...]