After our Mass Transit announcement last spring, UMI has been heads down, ingesting, normalizing, (re)validating, researching, verifying, and updating piles of mass transit-related information. Today we’re announcing the first of several key initiatives around public transportation: the Mass Transit Proximity API is born. Similar to our Neighborhood API, any bit (byte?) of content can be associated with relevant neighborhood (and now mass transit) information. A technical demo is available to help developers with documentation. Massively useful for business listings, real estate listings, mobile applications and a variety of other uses. We maintain an extensive collection of data elements and have several more exciting related announcements we’ll be making over the next few weeks. This one is the tip of the iceberg.

Why is this interesting/of note? Let’s say you run a real estate website. You have listings, demographic data, schools data, quality of live issues, etc…But what is the nearest subway station or bus stop? The Mass Transit Proximity API allows interactive publishers to append their content with UMI’s mass transit info, so that apartment for sale on 35 Charlton Street in Manhattan would have Houston Street Station (1, 2 train) and Spring Street Station (C, E train) associated with it. Sexy, no, but useful, massively. Do this with 100,000 new real estate listings per month or 15m business listings and there’s something consumers will like.

-The official news

UMI’s Ian White will present at the Telematics Update Navigation & Location USA conference in San Jose, December 2-3. Urban Mapping will announce several key initiatives and product milestones at the event.

The Wall Street Journal writes last month about geotargeting. While not new news, percolating into the business press no doubt took a fair mount of work from the Quova PR team. The article highlights the strengths: regional content targeting (to watch or not to watch the Red Sox depending on where you are), anti fraud and other measures. The money sentence:

Still, geolocation technology won’t pinpoint Web visitors’ locations beyond the city level, which won’t satisfy advertisers seeking to target potential customers by neighborhood or street.

Correct, indeed. Umibot has often-written about Urban Mapping’s geographically-modified keyword research tool (many enhancements coming soon) that can help overcome this technical limitation of IP-based geotargeting. However, simply being able to target at a local leavel, without considering inventory and advertisers, is folly. As Ian White discussed in a recent location-based services conference in Berlin, the debunking of the “local mobile Starbucks advertising” (nb, extremely tired example), whereby a person walks past a Starbucks and a coupon for a latte suddenly appears, is patently false–now and forever in the near future. But more on that soon…

Today we’re thrilled to announce that Rogers, the uber-large Canadian telco, has launched Zoocasa, a home researching and buying site. We’re thrilled with the’ve included UMI’s search-by-neigbhorhood functionality as this makes finding a su casa ever so easy!

The official news

UMI’s Ian White will particiapte on a panel discussion, Maps: They’re Not Just For Driving Anymore, on Thursday, December 11.

Like many industries, mapping (or more specifically, data) has its colorful characters and unusual conferences–there’s ZIP code guy (knows demographics for seemingly every ZIP), addressing guy (a better way to define addressing for more efficient mail delivery), parcel map guy (yes, that’s his bag) and a host of other characters.

But the top has just been blown off all this…

Enter the sub-sub-sub market segment of mapping: neighborhood boundaries. UMI’s customer list is well-known and we continue to enhance the product by employing thousands of sources, many of them deployed on the ground. We expand geographic coverage, augment the data model and spend a great deal of time listening to customer needs. We didn’t inherit or acquire a legacy database from anybody. All our work is our own.

Consider reading the Wired article to get a sense of some ‘friction’ between competing firms. It says it all. Umibot takes issue with one factual point:

Since Wahl pioneered the industry four years ago…

That’s not quite correct. Not sure if ‘pioneering’ means shouting in the forest, but UMI’s fearless leader, Ian White, certainly first commercialized a neighborhood boundary database.

Just clarifying the record…

Today we’re thrilled to announce our latest partnership–UMI has developed a custom product to allow InfoUSA customers immediate access to our rich neighborhood taxonomy. This product was developed with the singular objective of minimizing integration efforts. Too often, the complexity of working with spatial data is overlooked, leading to lengthy and expensive post-sale development. Not the case here!

We’re pleased to be working with the undisputed king of direct marketing–InfoUSA’s client roster is to be envied, and the opportunity to add value to their client base is gratifying.

The official news

For San Francisco in 1953, it was about 9 lbs. Recent acquisition to the UMI rare book collection includes this gem. Over 2200 pages of goodness that is chock full of advertising–on the spine, front cover, back cover, margins, every which way…makes today’s YP products pale in comparison.

Urban Mapping is a proud sponsor of TransitCamp (why no space?), which actually has its roots in BarCamp, and descends from the old metasyntactic variable. TransitCamp takes place this Saturday, September 13 at the SamTrans offices in San Carlos, CA. We’re supporting this event because mass transit is the next big thing. UMI’s going all in. We’ve announced some of our transit initiative, but there is much, much more under the hood and it will be announced in the very near future.

SEO professionals (such as The Emperor) practice their craft to help organizations establish a findable online presence. The ‘optimization’ does a bit (ok, significant amount) of dumbing down the grade level of what’s written. One could easily argue that is a good thing, since such a small percentage of the adult (or overall) population can’t read very well anyway. The typical newspaper (not talking WSJ or NY Times here) is written in fairly easy-to-digest prose, so it’s fair to say that SEO activities are a reflection of society.

To see your level of lexical elitism, play this fun SEO game: run a search and see what separates the top-ranked listing from those further down the page (or next page). We did so with plumber and fed the first page of copy through a ‘smarty-pants-readability’ tool.

Our findings below. Proof positive that good SEO=lower grade level. So ends Umibot’s argument against the SEOism of life as we know it.

Here begins Umibot’s argument for SEO-friendly standards in business cards. It’s a fairly visual argument, represented by Exhibit A and Exhibit B. Let’s just say they are not card scanner friendly.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B