Placed, a Seattle-based startup, is building one of the largest location-based databases around.

In July I noted that Placed is collecting 400 data points from 300 million locations (per CEO David Shim, as reported by Derrick Harris from GigaOM), i.e., a dataset of 120 billion elements each time it is updated.  Impressive!

Devindra Hardawar from Venturebeat reported in August 2012 that Placed recorded 1 billion data elements in 60 days, which says that Placed may have a long way to go to execute its plan.  In fact, at the current rate the Placed database would be completed by 2032.

In any event, Placed is up to something very intriguing, since it’s one of a few companies that are both “cleaning” location data (to fill out holes where GPS coordinate data is lacking) and adding a robust set of interpretative data (demographics, velocity, location characteristics, etc.) to enable marketers to have actionable intelligence.

In October 2012 the company launched Placed Panels to enable businesses to recruit their own “panels” of consumer participants to gather location data around their own unique interests.