GeoIP and Geo-Targeting
Lately I have been busy with a web-based geo-targeting project. For those of you not familiar with geo-targeting, the deeper you get into geo-targeting, the more you realize how important and interesting it is. Geo-targeting is used for fraud detection, personalization, ad-targeting, content-delivery, and more. In addition, the same basic concept is used at the core of many content delivery network (CDN) technologies.
The easiest way to get started in geo-targeting is to get familiar with GeoIP by MaxMind. For web-based applications using Apache server, I have been using the mod_geoip API. MaxMind has freely available GeoIP APIs for Apache (mod_geoip) C , C#, Java, MS COM, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and VB.Net. In addition, MaxMind generously provides free versions of some of their commercial GeoIP databases (the GeoLite series), GeoLite Country, GeoLite City, and GeoLite ASN.
It is really easy to get started in geo-targeting and I highly recommend MaxMind, as you can see. I’ve been using GeoLite Country and mod_geoip and it works quite well. The free versions of GeoLite databases are less accurate than the commercial versions, but very good to get started with. Check it out! Geo-targeting is really interesting and very useful. Here is a good list of other GeoIP resources.
I will try to “develop less” and “blog more” in the future. My apologies for being “off-the-air” lately. I have been busy with a number of interesting projects.
Filed under: Analytics, CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing, Cybersecurity, Event Cloud, Event Processing, Extrusion Detection, Fraud Detection, Intrusion Detection, Network Monitoring, Open Source, Predictive Business, Process Optimization, Risk Management, Security Event Management, Sensor Fusion, Simple Event Processing, Systems Engineering, Use Cases
