New quarter, new update. Today Urban Mapping announces availability of 84,000+ neighborhoods across the US,  Canada and Europe. This latest push reflects the company’s commitment to its flagship product. Developers are welcome to register for our free API and let the results speak for themselves.

Umibot has been helping the producers of this September’s MetaPlaces with programming decisions. We’re excited in that this show looks beyond web-based technologies–it asks the question how any of this makes money. In an increasingly mobile world with distribution mattering beyond all else, how can a vendor of content survive? Should carriers cede power and partner more nimble players who have a faster time to market?

We’ve argued that location doesn’t matter for a while. You read this correctly. The reason is that everything that can be located, will be. Location has become a commodity. LBS providers on their own offer a simple service that’s available through a variety of methods. There is no holy grail of location. The relevance, value and opportunity is what one does with location–translating lng/lat into something human-readable, and making it actionable, perishable and tied to a transaction is where this is going.

That’s the teaser. Hoping you can join us in San Jose, September 22 and 23.

UMI is looking for a few renegade programmers to help grow our technical and customer base. We’re looking for junior and midlevel talent–anywhere from 1-5 years experience to help in a variety of technical areas. The work is always challenging and new. Currently we need help to support development of our mass transit routing platform, which includes a multimodal routing engine, massive data ingestion/normalization, cloud deployment and operational support. Obsession with public transportation, routing, optimization and related interests are welcome.

We follow a bit of a modified agile development model, value lean management and love taking products to market long before competition has conceived of them. Specific skills we seek include: RDBMS, Python, Java, Ruby, C/C++, Perl, Objective C/iPhone development, Postgres/Postgis, SQL, GIS, HTML, Javascript, Linux setup/ops.

If this sounds interesting to you, please drop us a line with a bit about your background, recent hack and anything else that sets you apart. Please direct to talent(at)urbanmapping(dot)com.

UMI was recently selected as a semifinalist for the annual NAVTEQ LBS Challenge. It’s an annual competition NVT sponsors to show off the latest-and-greatest LBS applications. This year we partnered with Lightpole, a software and services company offering carrier-grade server infrastructure and applications that enable publishers to distribute geo-specific content to mobile devices. In 2008 UMI was also named a semi-finalist for its Mass Transit finder application.

The Panamap has done it again–this time named Best of Show in the 2009 HOW International Design Awards.The recently-relaunched map was named best overall product from over 3,000 entries.

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- The official news

With five out of five appearances, UMI’s own Ian White will present at the annual geo-confab, this time speaking about smart transit, smart infrastructure, and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The Where 2.0 conference takes place in San Jose, May 19-21, 2009.

UMI’s Ian White will participate on a panel, Mobile Search-A Driving Force, at CTIA Wireless’ Mobile Marketing & Advertising in Las Vegas, March 31 2009.

From the ever-opinionated Tim O’Reilly, waxing on for profit opportunities emerging from not-for-profit ventures. To Umibot, the most interesting part of this post was the history of online access to SEC filings (thank you Carl Malamund). In brief, the combination of antiquated computer systems, bureaucrats dismissive of public access (”who would want THAT?”) and government contractors equal intransigence, but Carl explains the much better in the first person:

In the summer of 1993, I was helping my friends at Sun Microsystems give a demonstration of the Internet to the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the U.S. House of Representatives. It was a typical Internet demonstration: we hauled a couple hundred boxes of equipment into the U.S. Capitol, set it up overnight, and did a bunch of “the future is here” show-and-tell. Live video coming in from Russian satellites, cell phones hooked up to the net, yadda, yadda, yadda. Everybody was suitably impressed.

After the demonstration, Chairman Edward J. Markey, came up to me and wondered if I could look into something that was bugging him. His subcommittee had responsibility not only for the telecommunications industry, but also for oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission. A bunch of Nader’s Raiders had been sending in petitions to the subcommittee asking why the SEC filings weren’t available on the Internet. The initial reaction from the SEC was that the reason the data wasn’t on the Internet was that it was technically impossible, and that even if the data were available the only people interested in SEC fillings were Wall Street Fatcats and they didn’t really need subsidized access to data they were willing to pay for.

If something is technically impossible, I get interested. I looked at the EDGAR system and decided it was worth taking a crack at it. Our first cut at the problem was to try and work with the SEC. Chairman Markey’s Chief of Staff asked the SEC to come in and discuss the idea of giving us the data and letting us put together an Internet site. There was a bit of pushback, to say the least.

The problem was the 70’s era data processing system that the SEC had put in place in the late 80’s. The deal was that EDGAR was way too rough for consumers to digest. It needed, to speak the MIS lingo of the time, “value-add.” Who would add value? Well, the SEC had cut a contract with a data wholesaler who would add value. The wholesaler, in turn, would sell to information retailers who would add even more value. Then, the information would be sold on the retail information market to the Wall Street crowd who had an interest in the data. Obviously, if we gave away all this information on the Internet, it would subvert our entire Free Enterprise System.

In that meeting with the SEC and the Chairman’s staff, my favorite moment was when we got to the question of why in the world people would want to see EDGAR data. I maintained that the Internet was full of lots of people—students, journalists, senior citizen investors—who were dying for access to this data. The SEC felt that only a few people would want to see EDGAR documents, and besides the Internet (or “the ARPANET” as they kept referring to it) “didn’t have the right kind of people.”

This would be a good teaser for a Hollywood blockbuster. Fortunately, the Concerned Citizen won out here, but it took a while. Not yet the case for open access to mass transit information. something Umibot is passionate about.

The take-away in graphics:

Since everybody loves free (especially in the current economic climate), we decided to offer more free products. Today we’re announcing the Free Mass Transit Proximity API–this product was announced last November, and it enables developers to use location in (more) interesting ways: associate ad address with subway/bus/train station name, distance and other attributes. Or open your mobile phone and ping our API to tell you the closest train station to your location.

You can register as a developer, read more about the Mass Transit Proximity API and sign up for a key at our developer portal.