With the growing number of devices that broadcast location, knowing "place" has become relatively easy. This enables developers to create unique applications that add value to a raw point. BlockChalk, a neighborhood bulletin board system for mobile devices, uses Urban Mapping's URBANWARE Neighborhood API to organize messages according to neighborhood and thus delivers an essential feature of its user experience.
"BlockChalk is all about connecting with your neighbors. People strongly identify with the communities in which they live, and yet neighborhood names and boundaries are often subjective or even personal," stated BlockChalk's co-founder, Stephen Hood. "We needed a way to cope with the ambiguity of the real world and Urban Mapping had the answer. Their definition of fuzzy boundaries allows us to satisfy discriminating users, recognizing that everybody is an expert when it comes to local. Since launching in January 2010, we already have users in over 16,000 neighborhoods all over the world, and we expect increased growth as we grow and evolve BlockChalk."
"We're excited about partners like BlockChalk as they use our neighborhood boundary data in new ways. As Urban Mapping strives to maintain its leadership role in hyperlocal content, we are guided by our rigorous research methods, listening to the pulse of local," stated Ian White, Urban Mapping's founder and CEO. "This type of research captures the way people conceptualize the world around them, enabling developers to create relevant and intuitive applications for their users."
About URBANWARE Neighborhoods
Urban Mapping's neighborhood boundary database is the most comprehensive product of its kind, enabling increased relevance for users and greater precision for advertisers. The boundary collection for the United States now totals nearly 86,600 neighborhoods for over 3,100 cities and towns. In addition, Urban Mapping's set of international boundary data now includes almost 17,000 neighborhoods across Canada and Europe. By geographically encoding boundaries of thousands of neighborhoods, UMI provides precise latitude and longitude points for every neighborhood. The neighborhood data can be accessed through a simple and cost-effective API and is also available in other formats including XML, WKT, ASCII and SHP.
Urban Mapping's unique research process compiles information from thousands of primary sources, drawing on real estate, tourism, retail and hospitality industries. This research results in neighborhood data that define boundaries in a way that accounts for the informal nature of urban geography. By recognizing that a location can technically be in two or more neighborhoods, Urban Mapping eliminates binary boundaries and replaces them with conditional boundaries. Because conditional boundaries incorporate this inherent fuzziness, they are more in tune with the way people understand informal spaces, resulting in neighborhood boundaries that are more realistic and accurate. This underlying data representation formed the basis for Urban Mapping's patent pending approach to defining informal space.
About Urban Mapping, Inc.
Urban Mapping's location-rich URBANWARE products enhance the value of local content for interactive applications. The company's flagship product, URBANWARE Neighborhoods, is a database of informal space and is used by all major portals, map platforms and Internet yellow page publishers, including Yahoo!, Microsoft's Bing Maps, YP.COM, Google, Idearc's SuperPages.com and MapQuest. Urban Mapping also offers databases of mass transit systems and off-street parking lots and Mapfluence, a hosted geoservices mapping platform. For more information about Urban Mapping, visit
http://www.urbanmapping.com or call 415.946.8170.
Urban Mapping, URBANWARE, Mapfluence and Routeserver are registered trademarks of Urban Mapping, Inc. All other names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Add to Digg Bookmark with del.icio.us Add to Newsvine
