Another day, another milestone…
Our neighborhood database now includes over 2,400 cities across 50 states (and a few territories). We continue to increase breadth and depth, supporting enterprise customers and startups leveraging our Neighborhood API. International coverage continues to grow, and more news shortly!
The official word
A few months ago Yahoo! announced it had incorporated neighborhood search into Local and other properties. We’re pleased to say this is brought to you by Umibot and the hard-working team at Urban Mapping, so Yahoo! can now enjoy the same neighborhood goodness as many of our other satisfied customers.
Here’s the official news.
Umibot’s been a proud servant to AT&T’s YellowPages.com for some time, but neighborhood search functionality is now front and center, so search by neighborhood to your heart’s delight!
As in, literally…
Today we’re excited to announce a partnership with Intelligent Direct, the market leader of custom print and data solutions for business. Through publication of custom electronic and printed maps of all sizes, companies can better manage the impact of location, geography and demographics.
Urban Mapping’s neighborhood boundary database will be incorporated into custom solutions. IDI’s MarketMAPS division has served thousands of clients in its 25+ year history.
Umibot is most excited about the offline possibilities. Even though it’s not clear if a bot can exist in the real world, there’s no question direct marketing does. And it’s huge. And small/medium-sized businesses think about overall marketing impacts and budgets, not segmenting by channel. This announcement is the first of several to link interactive and direct marketing efforts.
-The official news
Phew! After more than a year in development and two years deep in Umibot’s RAM, today we unveil a grand plan: normalized mass transit data for (today) 53 public transportation systems in the US, Canada and UK. To get here we had to develop other pieces–a data intake platform and a schema. Some more info on all of these:
Web-based Mass Transit Data Intake Platform (no acronym yet) Umibot believes the greatest cost in data collection is identifying and purging the system of dirty data. By auto-validating data at point of input, we’re able to significantly reduce this cost. UMI’s proprietary web-based platform is flexible and captures the vast collection of spatial and attribute data we manage. This includes things like routes, station footprints, exits (you can’t generally exit at a ‘station’), hours of operation, handicap accessibility, elevator location, amenities (retail, bathroom, telephone, etc…) and a great deal more. We then associate this attribute data with the ‘spine’ of spatial data and then compute a graph network, making the data ‘routing ready’ across a variety of platforms.
Transit agencies can take advantage of this platform by using UMI’s infrastructure as a platform to inventory their own data. It’s a well-known fact that transit agencies face bureaucratic, technical and legal challenges to releasing data, and this platform is one more reason for transit agencies to partner with industry to increase data distribution and support increased ridership by driving awareness.
Normalized schema
Before we began data collection, a uniform schema that recognizes transit nuances and complexities needed to be developed. For example, scheduling for the London Tube operates on a headway, meaning trains depart every Xish minutes. New York’s MTA operates on a tabular schedule, with scheduled departure times. Sounds like a detail, and it that’s exactly what it is–multiply this nuance 100 times and there’s a great deal of data definition that matters. What we’ve developed is internal to UMI and offers tremendous flexibility to add new mode types (ferry, funicular, etc). It has nothing to do with the output customers receive, and we’ll have more news about that soon.
Coverage The map below reflects current US coverage. Across the 53 transit systems, UMI has defined over 14,000 individual stations and over 100,000 data attributes. Stay tuned for increased coverage, attributes, service delivery and partnerships!
And some fun transit statistics for current coverage:
22% of transit stations have bathrooms (they may not be operable/accessible, but they exist)
35% of transit stations have dedicated parking
FYI: Wire release
Umibot’s been overclocking the past few weeks, and for good reason. Today Urban Mapping passed a new milestone and is thrilled to announce boundary data for more than 40,000 neighborhoods in the US. In addition, UMI continues to increase coverage across Canada and European countries, bringing our global coverage to more than 50,000 neighborhoods across 2,000+ cities and 15+ countries. Users of our enterprise and web services delivery can tap into this collective pool of rich local knowledge. A new shiny map of the Continental US displaying coverage:
Some more great things in store over the next several weeks (including an announcement at Where2.0 next week), so ensure you are RSS-compliant!
We’ve been working on it for quite some time, and today are thrilled to announce the first public release of our GeoMods geotargeting platform. In the past my master has written and spoken about the perils of IP-based geotargeting for local search.
Here’s the fact: for local targeting, where granularity matters (and some will argue it doesn’t yet matter), resolving an IP address to a location doesn’t work. The UMI solution doesn’t claim to be a technical solution, but rather aggregates large sets of geographic keywords around existing search behavior. It’s a mouthful to explain, but stand by for more on that front.
Urban Mapping’s Ian White will perform a hat trick at this year’s conference, participating on a panel, Monetizing Maps & Mashups. Greg Sterling will moderate and other panelists will be revealed in short order…
Umibot is all kinds of tired from several days in Las Vegas, where Urban Mapping brought together industry leaders for two days of off the record discussion about the ‘state of local.’ The event was billed as a ‘part salon, part workshop,’ recognizing that a substantive and engaging dialog is best set in a relaxed and informal environment.
UMI brought together industry stalwarts and upstarts. Analysts presented research, executives shared key insights and the group worked (and ate and drank) through the complexities, nuances and opportunities around local search: geotargeting perils and realities, ‘market inversion’ around local ad inventory, mobile growth, user behavior and market forces.
The esteemed group:
Jake Ballie, Managing Director, STN Labs
Matthew Berk, Lead Search Architect, Marchex
Pete Flint, Founder and CEO, Trulia
Craig Greenfield, Director, Local Search, DoubleClick
Jeff Greenwald, Director, Search Products, MapQuest
Martin Herbst, Senior Strategy Manager, Kijiji
Peter Krasilovsky, Program Director, Marketplaces, The Kelsey Group
Farhan Memon, Senior Product Manager, AOL Search
Ted Morgan, CEO, Skyhook Wireless
Fred Owens, Vice President, Business Development, Medio Systems
Justin Sanger, President, LocalLaunch!
Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence and Senior Analyst, Local Mobile Search
Steven Stern, SVP, Sales & Market Development, Urban Mapping
Ethan Stock, CEO, Zvents
Joel Toledano, CEO, Krillion
Jaron Waldman, CEO, Placebase
Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping
Disclosure: Jake Baillie and Greg Sterling sit on the Board of Directors at UMI.
