Urban Mapping’s own (guess who) Ian White will participate at MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit May 18-21 on Captiva Island, FL. Ian will participate on several panel discussions and breakout sessions. Umibot is thrilled that UMI will be at the event as it will provide a good opportunity to take the pulse of search engine marketing and local search.

Today Umibot is pleased to announce a partnership with Placebase. Their map Pushpin map API is powerful and gives developers great flexibility in creating applications. Pb will distribute UMI’s Urbanware Neighborhood data product. Their map tile factory has been hard at work, making freshly-rendered tiles of SoHo, Nob Hill, LoDo, centre ville and about 25,000 other names. A Manhattan demo is available for you to look at and play with. Note different layers of neighborhoods as you zoom.

The neighborhood data news over at Placebase.

This morning Search Engine Land has a lengthy and informative article about geolocation–how it works, what it is used for, who offers it and who deploys it. The sentence in the article that sums it up for Umibot is this one:

The biggest problem in assessing the error rates of geolocation data is the simple fact that there’s no way to really test well for accuracy.

As the article indicates, this uncertainty has to do with proxy servers, load balancers and anonymized traffic. Urban Mapping’s georargeting solution (not yet unveiled, but in the latter stages of testing) will provide significant gains over existing geolocation technologies using a completely different technique–rather than identifying the location of an IP address, UMI sees to determine the intent of users, and tie that data to geographic space. A hard concept to understand, yes, but the results will speak for themselves. We’re excited to make this available and making some final tweaks, so the coming weeks should have some more news in store.