With election season upon us, and political divisiveness at an all time high, we thought it a good time to look at a history of secessionist movements in the US. The initial idea was to see how the various movements (South Florida, West Kansas, Vandalia, etc…) would compare to other states by looking at economic, social and other indicators. We then thought on this more…the ideal of any political movement is to gain independence, so we thought further: what if each secessionist movement was its own country, and how would it stack up with other countries across general measures of health, economy, education, environment and more.

So that’s what we did. We researched and loaded would-be entities and used Mapfluence estimate statistics. The results are both curious and concerning. Our Secessionist Movements and National Indicators map allows you to look at the 30 or so US movements and 15 indicators (with more coming). Take it for a spin and let us know your thoughts–comments are welcome and even encouraged!

You can also use 48 well spent seconds and watch a video preview!

You will mentor bright engineers to further Mapfluence, Urban Mapping’s cloud-based web mapping and analytics platform. You will be both tactician and strategist, growing the engineering team and planning platform architecture. Your 10+ years experience in software development arm you with the instinct to make the right decisions when writing code and managing others.

It’s about fit—do you have the creative/entrepreneurial drive, commitment to be unconventional and want to play a pivotal role in building a sustainable business? Urban Mapping is profitable and we’ve carved a niche over the past five years in all things geo-spatial, but now it’s time to blow that niche out of the water. We’re well-versed in SaaS business models, enterprise markets, Big Data, curation and more, long before these terms were sexy. Think a “data marketplace” is the next big thing? We don’t! Here’s our CEO boiling it down in under four minutes. Interested building a Shortest Path Tree implementation to generate isochrones using public transportation and the road network? Want to know what we think about the death of delivery by CD-ROM? That will take a little more than six minutes.

We’re looking for a visionary who knows that getting the job done takes focus, delight and honest communication. Those who have jumped job to job enough to arouse suspicion won’t be a great fit. Somebody who has been waiting for the right opportunity will like the idea of the ‘startup that’s started up,’ ie, lower risk.

Some more about your background:
* A track record of leadership and success
* Several years experience managing an engineering team of at least 5 people
* Several years experience leading the team for a high-availability website
* Experience with agile release cycles
* Experience in a start-up environment
* Experience conducting design/code reviews, performance tuning and low level debugging

Your skills should include:
* Demonstrated understanding of strategies for high availability web sites including caching/clustering techniques
* Experience working with web APIs and Software as a Service (SaaS)
* Broad experience with web application frameworks
* Complete familiarity with n-tiered web, clustered architectures.
* Deep database experience, preferably some with Postgres
* Several years of server-side OOP software development, preferable with Python, Java, or C++
* Comfortable working in Linux
* Well versed in HTML, CSS, Javascript

This position pays a competitive base salary + benefits, including paid vacation, health insurance, stock options, training/education, centrally located in San Francisco’s Financial District, regular company outings, food & fun, etc… Local candidates preferred and we’re ready to hire as soon as you are able to interview!

The best way to learn about this position and to catch our interest is for you to look at what we’ve done and offer a critique—if you are going to challenge us on the job, start doing so now: visit our Developer Portal and let us know what you think. If this role speaks to you, please get in touch with us at talent@urbanmapping.com with “Sr Eng Mgr” in the subject line. Include a note of interest, your resume and links/background to anything you think is relevant. Generic cover letters aren’t a good use of time, but checking references and having distinct points of view are.

Urban Mapping, Inc offers hosted mapping and integrated data services. We run the business off of operations with only seed financing, love having real customers like Yahoo!, Microsoft and Tableau Software, do not have Xbox or Guitar Hero and are ‘forced’ to remain profitable. We don’t expect you to work 24×7, but we want you to be committed. For more information, please visit www.urbanmapping.com.

KWs: Amazon Web Services, AWS, GIS, geospatial, map, geographic, geocode, demographics, site selection, subway, train, multi-modal, cartography, basemap, mapnik, rendering, tilemill, transit, enterprise software, profitable, fun

Come one, come all and help us celebrate a very good year (brought to you by prudent financial planning).

Like what you see? Don’t like what you see? Either way, let us know by joining the conversation and commenting. We’re always on the lookout for more cartographers to join our Cartographer in Residence program, and of course any curious and talented technical staff.

Today we’re thrilled to take the covers off a new application. It’s tied to Mapfluence, Urban Mapping’s hosted mapping platform, but goes beyond our top-notch thematic mapping and data query capability. Travelshed is designed to go where no web-based mapping platform has gone before. This beta version computes isochrones for walk+public transportation in NYC and the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s being unveiled for the MTA’s APPQUEST competition to make use of MTA transit data. Given our rich history in the world of data collection an normalization and partnership with MapQuest to license our mass transit data product, this made great sense for us.

The resulting map generates colored contours of how far one can travel. Notice the islands of accessibility in Queens and Brooklyn–this indicates an express train that clearly extends the distance one can travel by train in a fixed period of time.

Public voting and official judging happens between November 30 and December 21, so we’d love you to “like” our application (a la Facebook) by visiting the submission gallery until then. After November 30 we’ll drop a few more hints about why you should vote for this application.

A few things to note about this application:

• It’s in beta, so feedback from you = good
• Coverage limited to NYCTA subway, San Francisco Bay Area’s BART and Caltrain
• Walkshed will work anywhere worldwide
• Many improvements already underway; you can guess what the obvious ones are and we’ll keep you in suspense about others