Rafe Needleman’s Webware offers a concise overview of UMI’s neighborhood database product.

This morning at the TechCrunch40 Conference Urban Mapping announced its latest customer–we’re thrilled to count Microsoft among the portals that utilize UMI’s products. Now may every man, woman and child find their way through congested and urban areas!

UMI’s Ian White will speak at GeoWeb 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, July 23-27, 2007. His talk, Web-based GIS or GIS-based Web?, will address how neogeographers have changed consumption habits of spatial data.

Surprise! Yahoo! Maps is going inhouse with its own map server. This is after 5+ years with Telcontar, aka deCarta. Some new changes out today and apparently more in the works.

Thanks, Adena.

UMI has long argued that a significant piece of the value in using online maps & directions stems from the transitive property of interactive media–to some degree, the experience can come off the page and become portable.This means users are endowed with an artifact that represents the digital, but can engage with it in a tactile world. It would be easy to digress and pontificate on post-realism via Walter Benjamin or Jean Baudrillard, but Umibot lacks that memory implant, so have no fear…

The idea of maps & directions are to get from one point to another point. They are meant to be didactic and support wayfinding activities. That much is clear. It then follows that many users would print maps/directions and take them on the trip–other options may include a ‘send to phone’ feature, mobile browsing for directions, use of a GPS device or transcribing/summarizing directions by hand.

If a user prints a map and uses it for wayfinding, it becomes an invaluable artifact during the course of that journey–it may be referenced multiple times and the ‘eyeball quality’ is undoubtedly high (who has heard of a casual direction-follower?). So this begs the question…why are printed map/direction pages missing the obvious–highly-targeted and relevant advertising? A review of print-ready directions from Google, Yahoo!, Live Local, MapQuest, Ask and MSN reveal some interesting things.

This summary table highlights some key questions that may be obvious, but warrant consideration:

• Can multi-page directions be avoided? Should they be minimized?

• Do consumers need vast flexibility in ‘configuring a map for printing?’

Most importantly, does advertising make sense on a printed map? This is valuable real estate that currently looks like a greenfield site.

NOTE: Images below have been cropped and resized to fit this blog, so page lengths may not make sense, but they are–print them yourself to see!

Umibot feels that many readers won’t bat an eyelid over this, but my master feels strongly, so I must be a good slave and report…

The original idea was to have a Top Ten list, but frankly there aren’t many moves worthy of the Power Move moniker, so we will instead post them when we think of them.

Our favorite is AskCity’s draw-your-own-polygon and search within. There’s no hiding the fact that this take some serious geo-skillz to implement. To hell with ZIPs (or neighborhoods for that matter)–draw your own boundary!

This screen grab shows an area being drawn near UMI’s offices. As it is late morning, we are always hunting for new lunch spots in this half-industrial/half developed part of town.

This grab shows results–presto!

OK, not amazingly interesting, but a presentation from Yahoo! on local search coined a new term–RoBo: “research online, buy offline.”

Is this any more useful than Rev Mod (revenue model)?

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?”

Ian White will present at the New York State Geo-spatial Summit in North Creek, New York on June 9. His presentation, “The Design of Geodata,” will address how a user-led product development process can yield insight when deploying GIS applications.

Urban Mapping will present at Directions Media’s 2006 Location Intelligence conference in San Francisco April 3-5. Ian White will co-present with Greg Sadetsky of Poly9 and share a prototype for a novel local search platform. Attendees will gain insight into blending technology skills with user-driven research.