How does Foursquare return venues during search?

Will the Foursquare API let a user of our app search for venues by location and name, regardless of the user's current GPS location?

• We're building an iPhone app  and want to allow the user to search for venues by location and name  (i.e., find "Joe's Pizza" in "New York City"). Our preference is to use the Foursquare API, but it seems to require latitude and longitude as an input parameter; as a result, it won't let a user search beyond a specific radius around the user's current GPS location. Is there a way  to use Foursquare API to enable our desired functionality?

• Answer:

  You could do a geocode on the location, in your example, New York City, then enter the lat/long info you get from that into the venue search endpoint. There are plenty of APIs to choose from for geocoding: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/ And here's the info for the venues search endpoint: http://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/search.html