“The Geonames project is a free global geographical database.
The goal of GeoNames is to aggregate free data from various sources and make is available as a database or via a range of web services.
GeoNames answers questions such as: where is a place? what are its coordinates? which region or province does the place belong to? what city or address is near a given GPS latitude/longitude? Users of GeoNames typically need the data or web services for travel, real estate, online communities, store locators, vehicle tracking or address verification.”
Source: Duncan Riley, TechCrunch, May 26, 2007

Link: TechCrunch

“The Geonames project is a free global geographical database.
The goal of GeoNames is to aggregate free data from various sources and make is available as a database or via a range of web services.
GeoNames answers questions such as: where is a place? what are its coordinates? which region or province does the place belong to? [...]