Local Search is the darling app on most mobile phones/smartphones these days. Everyone loves to search for nearby pizza outlets or the nearest movie theatres, restaurants to eat, nightclubs to spend a good evening/night, and so on. Apps, such as foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp, allow users to find such local content using their smartphones.

foursquare goes further with a gamification strategy that benefits both the end users and the venues owners (for example, a restaurant owner), by offering loyalty programs, discounts, and user badges to flaunt, depending upon how many times a user has checked-in to a venue.

In this chapter, we look at how the foursquare extensive API sets and builds a local search app named PacktLocal.