The Wacky World of Neighborhood Data
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…
Tags: neighborhood database