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 own Ian White will be crossing the pond to Berlin, October 27-30, for IIR’s LBS conference in Germany. Ian will participate on a panel discussion, Can You Find The Way? Where Next For Mapping?” We aren’t sure if IIR is going for “where” or “what,” but that’s what makes panel sessions interesting.

Urban Mapping has been doing a great deal of work behind the scenes, and we’re thrilled with some upcoming announcements about our mass transit initiative.

[Update: Umibot says "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin!']

Umibot is thrilled to announce the addition of Steven Stern as SVP, Sales & Marketing. Effective immediately, Steven will drive business relationships for Urban Mapping’s Urbanware neighborhood, mass transit and GeoMods keyword research tool.

Steven brings 13 years of experience in web, mobile and print marketing and sales experience. In 1995 he entered the print advertising business by creating his own niche publication distributed on 5 college campuses in 3 states. He then began a career in the Yellow Page industry quickly rising through the ranks from sales representative to various senior sales management positions. In his last position for Yellow Book, Steven was responsible for managing the Yellow Book brand nationwide. More recently, he oversaw marketing, sales and business development for go2. This included responsibility for product management of over 320 award winning collegiate online and mobile local search websites that are part of the go2 local content network.