Urban Mapping is a proud sponsor of TransitCamp (why no space?), which actually has its roots in BarCamp, and descends from the old metasyntactic variable. TransitCamp takes place this Saturday, September 13 at the SamTrans offices in San Carlos, CA. We’re supporting this event because mass transit is the next big thing. UMI’s going all in. We’ve announced some of our transit initiative, but there is much, much more under the hood and it will be announced in the very near future.

Today, stealth startup Pelago pulls off the covers and unveils its web/mobile application that blends the social with the local (on the mobile, of course). Some call it Facebook meets MySpace, and others have described it as the tip of location-based services. UMI is thrilled to be a critical component of the product as neighborhoods provide the granularity and context that matter in complex urban spaces, and Pelago embraces this. Don’t take our word for it, give Whrrl a spin!

something that appeared over the in the Manifold BBS we recently ran across:

Words don’t really do justice to this Flash-based Map Analysis On-Line Interactive Services application. UMI appreciates the interplay between the tactile and the techno-embedded solutions. This is one of them.

We’ve been offering SOAP-based web services for several months, but only just now realized that only UMI staff and our first customer know of the API’s existence. It’s exciting for us to offer this service (actually, several services) so smaller organizations can tap into Urban Mapping’s geo-platform without paying enterprise-level fees. We offer a broad range of methods and have modularized design, anticipating future needs.

Users can geocode to neighborhood by long/lat, postal code and use a variety of other useful methods when granularity/precision matters.

So what does this mean for you? For starters, you can enjoy our wonderfully-designed and easy-to-use documentation, but it gets better. We also offer a technical demo with code snippets (in PHP, Ruby and XML) that will bring you joy. Learning to use our services for geocoding by long/lat, postal code and other methods is now within reach!

If you are interested in learning more, play for yourself or let us know.

ZipLocal, Canada’s second-largest local directory, has licensed Urban Mapping’s web services for ZipLocal’s newly-introduced user-focused local search directory.

Ian White will present at the third annual O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, California, May 29-30, 2007. His talk is entitled “How Open is Open?”