They are pretty unclear about how this is better than the Maxmind free DB they've based it on.

That one comes in a small binary file that allows to avoid even using a SQL DB for the lookups (faster for some people + easier to manage)

I asked them on their forum, a few months ago, this exact question. Below is their response...

With the DAT file [from Maxmind], you cannot do grouping (group by city,region,country), select IP by country (where country_code = 'US'), modify the data (eg : change country code from ISO to FIPS standard), join with other SQL tables and you can only do queries one at a time... Some people might not have access to the server (eg shared hosting) and the MySQL DB could be the only way they can install it. Also, some develloper might prefer using the data in a MySQL format because thats what the application they are running is using.

There is a few extras such as IP CIDR by country and I might add timezone soon.

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530086 and here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555782

Same database. Don't think we really need more topics pointing to the same page...

The only thing it gets right is the (US) State I am in. Still, that might be good enough for some people.

7 states off for me.

It gets my down to the borough of London I live in.

It thinks I'm in Bradford, about 60 miles from where I really am, on my home O2 broadband connection. At work, it just says "United Kingdom".

The geolocation on FF3.5 put me in a town five miles down the road at home. Very clever, considering my computer has no wi-fi!

Try dropping this code on your address bar, only works on Firefox 3.5

   javascript:navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position){window.location.href="http://maps.google.com/?ll="+position.coords.latitude+","+position.coords.longitude;});

(Click on "share location" button when asked, privacy concerns)