Urban Mapping’s Robert Hylkema will present at the WCA’s LBS Special Interest Group, July 28 2009 at PARC in Palo Alto. The SIG meeting, OnDeck: LBS Apps for 2010 and Beyond, will feature our URBANWARE Parking application, along with participants from Google, Yahoo!, Networks in Motion and others.
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.
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 official news
