Today UMI can help get you one step closer to effortless parking…by knowing where an off street lot is located. Sounds simple, and it actually is, but many times the small things get overlooked. Our new URBANWARE Parking database includes lots for close to 5,000+ facilities in the US and Canada. If there’s a lot, we know about it. Nothing but honest to goodness field research and a lot of data validation here.

The reason this product is exciting is that it ties directly to what drivers want–find the entrance, hours of operation, handicap-accessible facilities, indoor, above ground lots, and much more…We’re particularly excited about our fare calculator– somewhere in between early bird, oversize, hourly, special event, monthly and many other flavors of rates, determining the rate becomes a challenge of monumental proportion. That is, of course, assuming you want to have a rate calculator for the 5,000-odd lots located in the US. Our hard work equals your benefit!

As with our neighborhood and mass transit proximity APIs, we offer a technical demo for parking. Updates happen on a very regular basis, and data can be shipped via periodic update or transactions can be made from the API. For personal navigation, in car-nav devices, mobile phones with turn by turn, and web, this product offers a real common-sense solution. We hope you agree.

-the official news

]]> http://blog.urbanmapping.com/2008/12/02/urban-mapping-does-parking/feed/ 0 urbannapping Park it! http://blog.urbanmapping.com/2008/10/31/geolocation-gets-somewhat-sexy/ http://blog.urbanmapping.com/2008/10/31/geolocation-gets-somewhat-sexy/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:34:55 +0000 Ian http://urbanmapping.com/blog/?p=509 Continue reading →]]> The Wall Street Journal writes last month about geotargeting. While not new news, percolating into the business press no doubt took a fair mount of work from the Quova PR team. The article highlights the strengths: regional content targeting (to watch or not to watch the Red Sox depending on where you are), anti fraud and other measures. The money sentence:

Still, geolocation technology won’t pinpoint Web visitors’ locations beyond the city level, which won’t satisfy advertisers seeking to target potential customers by neighborhood or street.

Correct, indeed. Umibot has often-written about Urban Mapping’s geographically-modified keyword research tool (many enhancements coming soon) that can help overcome this technical limitation of IP-based geotargeting. However, simply being able to target at a local leavel, without considering inventory and advertisers, is folly. As Ian White discussed in a recent location-based services conference in Berlin, the debunking of the “local mobile Starbucks advertising” (nb, extremely tired example), whereby a person walks past a Starbucks and a coupon for a latte suddenly appears, is patently false–now and forever in the near future. But more on that soon…