We all make decisions about places every day. We choose a café, a supermarket, a neighbourhood, a school, a church, a destination, or a wedding venue. Usually this happens quickly, through gut feeling, visible signals, reputation, or convenience. But what if we could make our choices in a more structured way?

Place Insights is a personal research project about analyzing places, maps, and location technology.

I have been fascinated by the meaning of places since early childhood: crawling over large floor maps, exploring geographical games and points of interest, and imagining life in different places all over the world. Later, through my studies in international relations, I became more interested in how geography connects with power, infrastructure, information, mobility, and decision-making.

Over the last ten years, I began exploring this interest more deliberately. I read hundreds of travel guides, mapped more than 16,000 places in Google Maps, built detailed travel itineraries covering more than 100 countries, and started diving into GIS, Earth observation, and spatial data.

After 20 years in product marketing and digital strategy, I naturally approach places and location-tech products through questions of value, positioning, communication, and experience. This helps me ask what a place or location-tech product offers, who it is for, how clearly its value is communicated, and where it could be improved.

Place Insights brings these two perspectives together.

I compare different places, mapping platforms, geospatial companies, mobility solutions, and other location-based products. The goal is to look beyond surface descriptions and ask practical and critical questions from a product-marketing perspective.

This project is dedicated to the memory of my beloved mother, who was a geographer.