Today we’re thrilled to announce a new product–one that resonates with anybody who has been in a car or had to park one. It’s a fact that looking for parking is a major pain point in urban areas. Identifying lots is generally done by rapid scanning of both sides of the street followed by a quick glance in the rear view mirror to make sure nobody is behind you.

Today UMI can help get you one step closer to effortless parking…by knowing where an off street lot is located. Sounds simple, and it actually is, but many times the small things get overlooked. Our new URBANWARE Parking database includes lots for close to 5,000+ facilities in the US and Canada. If there’s a lot, we know about it. Nothing but honest to goodness field research and a lot of data validation here.

The reason this product is exciting is that it ties directly to what drivers want–find the entrance, hours of operation, handicap-accessible facilities, indoor, above ground lots, and much more…We’re particularly excited about our fare calculator– somewhere in between early bird, oversize, hourly, special event, monthly and many other flavors of rates, determining the rate becomes a challenge of monumental proportion. That is, of course, assuming you want to have a rate calculator for the 5,000-odd lots located in the US. Our hard work equals your benefit!

As with our neighborhood and mass transit proximity APIs, we offer a technical demo for parking. Updates happen on a very regular basis, and data can be shipped via periodic update or transactions can be made from the API. For personal navigation, in car-nav devices, mobile phones with turn by turn, and web, this product offers a real common-sense solution. We hope you agree.

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…

The Panamap, ready for a full page spread (with very little retouching–she is a natural beauty!)

Today we announce the addition of Greg Sterling to UMI’s board. His insight and experience lend a shining stamp of approval to the company.

The O’Reilly Radar, that is…

Brady offers a good overview of the latest & greatest in the geo-portal data wars. Of particular interest are his comments about owning the geostack:

Until recently, Yahoo! used deCarta to handle creating directions (or routing). They have announced that they have taken ownership of this part of the stack and have built their own routing engine. Ask and Google still use deCarta. Microsoft has always had their own. Yahoo! is hoping to make their new engine a differentiator. In some ways this is analogous to Microsoft’s purchase of Vexcel, a 3D imagery provider. Microsoft did not want the same 3D data as Google Earth or any other search engine for its 3D world.

I think that any vendor servicing Google, Microsoft, Ask, Yahoo or MapQuest will have to keep an eye on their next source of revenue. Those contracts aren’t going to necessarily last too long. The geostack is too valuable to outsource.

There is only one part of the stack that I think might be to expensive for any one of the engines to buy or build out right. That’s the street data and it’s a data source primarily supplied by two companies, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. NAVTEQ has a market cap of 3.5 bilion dollars as of this writing; Tela Atlas has one of 1.4 billion pounds. These would be spendy purchases. Microsoft is currently working closely with Facet Technology Corporation to collect street data for cities to add a street-level 3D layer (see Facet’s SightMap for a preview), but this Facet is not collecting data to match the other players. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo! parleys its partnership with OpenStreetMap into a data play.

[Brady’s spellchecker appears stuck in the ‘off’ position.]