I'm trying to understand the concept of pulling information off the web and into an app Please!

Generally speaking, how does an app like "Around Me" acquire the information it displays? For example: the restaurants that show up in a list that are near me with the address and distance (I think I get the distance piece) where is this information extracted from? Is it Google or something?

I'm not asking how to implement this (that's over my head!) just get an idea of how it occurs. Thanks StackOverFlow people.

I haven't seen that specific app, but most such apps either have an embedded database of locations or they dynamically query a server back-end (e.g. using HTTP) to fetch a set of locations near you. They know where you are because the app has access to location services to find out your geographic location.

The iPhone has a GPS unit which gives you your latitude and longitude, which it then sends to a backend server (Say Google Maps) and queries it for, in your case a restaurant. The server responds with a set of locations around you.