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 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!

Official news release

Tis the season…

UMI’s own Ian White will participate on a panel Getting Found in Local Search & Maps at Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto show, June 16-18.

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.

After some hard work/late nights and prodding from the geo-techno elite, we’ve humbly completed and are pleased to offer RESTful access to our neighborhood API.

What does this mean for developers? Probably less time spent developing and more time doing. Since we offered the SOAP-based free neighborhood API last month, dozens of individuals and companies have signed up, and we’re confident this announcement will spur another wave.

We’re also thrilled to be using Mashery to manage our multiple APIs. Ciaran and team twisted themselves pretzel-wise to get us up and running in no time at all. Calling Mashery ‘on demand’ is exactly what what they offer, and it’s what they delivered.

The news release with a quote from Brady Forrest and other goodness.

Urban Mapping’s Ian White will moderate a panel, Why Local Is Different, at the annual SES New York Conference & Expo at the Chicago Hilton, March 17-20.

UMI’s Ian White will speak at the Pelorus Group’s Mobile Local Search Forum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 20-21, 2008. He will participate in a panel on GPS & Location Based Services: Profit vs. Privacy.

UMI’s Ian White will speak at ad:tech in San Francisco, April 15-17, 2008. He will participate in a panel on local and mobile search