http://www.bizmoknows.com/blogs/entry/Selecting-Your-Geography-By-Neighborhood

John Copenhaver; Sr. Vice President – Subscription Group at infoUSA explained why they chose Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries in this press release they issued a while back.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081031005925&newsLang=en

Here’s part of what he said:

“We looked at other providers, but Maponics’ quality was by far the highest. In particular, their neighborhoods have distinct boundary lines, not the overlapping ones that other company’s offer. This ensures that users don’t purchase duplicate copies of the same address. That can happen when boundaries are allowed to overlap and individual addresses fall into two different neighborhoods at the same time. The Maponics neighborhood data captures three levels of neighborhoods: sub-neighborhoods, neighborhoods, and macro-neighborhoods. This gives our users the flexibility to target very broad or very micro neighborhoods.”

To learn more, visit our neighborhood boundaries page or email info@maponics.com.

To find out more, read the full press release here!

infoUSA Offers Customers the First Extensive Neighborhood Based Selection List: Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries(TM) and infoUSA Partner

OMAHA, Neb.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Oct. 31, 2008–infoGROUP (NASDAQ: IUSA), the leading provider of proprietary business and consumer databases, sales leads, direct marketing, email marketing, market research and global information solutions today announced infoUSA has chosen Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries to power the industry’s first high-performance neighborhood based selection list. infoUSA customers can now micro target their marketing efforts to over 50,000 true neighborhoods for higher response rates. Unlike tools that try to combine ZIP Codes, carrier routes or Census Tracts to come up with simulated neighborhoods, these neighborhoods are the actual areas that locals refer to informally by neighborhood name. infoUSA pre-tags addresses based on the neighborhood they fall in. Then users can choose from a list of neighborhood names and exactly the right addresses are selected.

“We’ve known for a long time that local search and local direct marketing need to be done on the neighborhood level, to SoHo or Hell’s Kitchen in New York City for example”, says John Copenhaver; Sr. Vice President – Subscription Group at infoUSA. “But until recently, there has not been any way to categorize address data by neighborhood because there was no way to accurately know what the neighborhood boundaries or names were. They are not part of any national tracking system, like postal codes or city boundaries are”, John Copenhaver added.

“infoUSA’s leadership in database marketing is renown and we’re honored to be chosen to help them with this first-ever capability,” says Darrin Clement, president of Maponics. “Their customers now have one more reason to rely on infoUSA as the best place for marketing lists.”

“We looked at other providers, but Maponics’ quality was by far the highest,” said John Copenhaver. “In particular, their neighborhoods have distinct boundary lines, not the overlapping ones that other company’s offer. This ensures that users don’t purchase duplicate copies of the same address. That can happen when boundaries are allowed to overlap and individual addresses fall into two different neighborhoods at the same time. The Maponics neighborhood data captures three levels of neighborhoods: sub-neighborhoods, neighborhoods, and macro-neighborhoods. This gives our users the flexibility to target very broad or very micro neighborhoods.”

About Maponics

Maponics specializes in mapping services and map data for businesses. America’s largest corporations entrust Maponics with their mapping and data needs – including 20 percent of the Fortune 500. Maponics is located in Norwich, Vermont, with customers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Learn more at www.maponics.com.

Contact Maponics today at 800-762-5158 to discuss how local map data such as neighborhood, carrier route, or ZIP Code boundaries can improve your users’ experience.

About infoGROUP

infoGROUP (www.infoGROUP.com) (NASDAQ: IUSA), founded in 1972, is the leading provider of business and consumer databases for sales leads & mailing lists, database marketing services, data processing services and sales and marketing solutions. Content is the essential ingredient in every marketing program, and infoGROUP has the most comprehensive data in the industry, and is the only company to own 12 proprietary databases under one roof. The infoGROUP database powers the directory services of the top Internet traffic-generating sites. Nearly 4 million customers use infoGROUP products and services to find new customers, grow their sales, and for other direct marketing, telemarketing, customer analysis and credit reference purposes. infoGROUP headquarters are located at 5711 S. 86th Circle, Omaha, NE 68127 and can be contacted at (402) 593-4500. To know more about Sales Leads, click www.infoGROUP.com.

Statements in this announcement other than historical data and information constitute forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by such forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, recent changes in senior management, the successful integration of recent and future acquisitions, fluctuations in operating results, failure to successfully carry out our Internet strategy or to grow our Internet revenue, effects of leverage, changes in technology and increased competition. More information about potential factors that could affect the company’s business and financial results is included in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

CONTACT: infoGROUP
Lisa Olson, 402-593-4541
Senior Vice President, Corporate Relations
E-Mail: lisa.olson@infogroup.com

SOURCE: infoGROUP

With millions of websites available, people are trying to find the most effective tools to help them geographically focus their search results.

Search engines and industry-specific verticals have been watching this shift in search. Eager to capture the loyalty of searchers, they are working to create easier ways for people to search locally – via their desktops, cell phones, and even their car navigation systems. As a result, information is increasingly available by county, city and ZIP Code. But is that enough?

Neighborhoods Are The Ultimate in “Local” Geography

But those on the cutting edge have taken local search one step closer to home: they’ve added neighborhoods to the mix. Their searchers in the Upper East Side or the East Village can now happily find results covering only their neighborhood, without having to weed through results for the entire city of New York, or try to figure out which ZIP Codes cover which areas.

To see the impact of search by neighborhood vs. search by city in action, we did a search for a pizza place in New York City using CitySquares, a Maponics neighborhood data customer. CitySquares offers search to connect people to local businesses for several cities across the U.S.

Can You Ever Have Too Much Pizza?

A search for the entire city of New York gave us a list of over 1,300 pizza places! When we limited our search to just Manhattan, there were only 500. Not as many, but still way to many to scroll through if you are hungry, short on time, or new to the city. Our search by neighborhood: only 32 for the Upper and just 15 for the East Village. Much more manageable, and all within walking distance.

Few companies have the ability to compile the accurate ZIP Code and Neighborhood data that forms the backbone of local search. Maponics, a leader in mapping data development, offers both nationwide data sets for inclusion in any web-based application. Learn more about our GIS Data solutions or call us at 800-762-5158.

Through a network of real estate brokers, Roost offers a comprehensive search engine for potential homebuyers. According to Roost the addition of Maponics data will “deliver an easy and intuitive way for homebuyers to zero in on areas of interest”. Roost users will now be able pin point their searches by neighborhood in over 1000 US cities. Read the Roost press release for more info or visit roost.com!

You rely on Maponics Neighborhood Data for clear, single-line, non-overlapping boundaries. And for our exclusive hierarchy system which breaks neighborhoods into 3 intuitive levels: neighborhoods, macro-neighborhoods and sub-neighborhoods. But did you know that the new alternate names table (introduced with this release) now gives you not only a neighborhood’s primary name, but other local names for it too? This significantly improves search and mapping for your users. Don’t worry — we’re not counting the alternate names when we say that we now cover 10,000 more unique neighborhoods!

Look for more news in the near future – Maponics is committed to providing the highest quality data to our customers, updated quarterly. With each license, we offer:

• Data delivery in multiple formats
• Professional customer support
• A 100% money back guarantee

Learn more about Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries or call 1-800-762-5158 to sign up for quarterly updates.

Maponics Releases 20,000 Neighborhood Boundaries

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They’ve got a great business model and aren’t just talking the talk – they hold local events themselves, and are really committed to their own neighborhoods. Sign up for their newsletter and keep an eye on these guys – they may be coming to your neighborhood next!

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We at Maponics believe that neighborhoods are best broken into 3 types: neighborhoods, macro-neighborhoods and sub-neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods are notoriously tough to define. An urban neighborhood is a part of a city that is generally not defined legally, and is instead rather informal. “Chinatown” or “Downtown” are cliché examples, but capture the essence. In those cases, Maponics defines “the consensus of perception” – the boundaries as most people would define them. Are there disagreements? You bet. But any informal space like a neighborhood is bound to be open to interpretation – even among people who live there.

Suburban neighborhoods are often more akin to residential housing developments and might be slightly more formal. Most cities with more than about 75,000 population will likely have urban neighborhoods, but as city population decreases there are less likely to be urban neighborhoods and subdivisions become more prevalent.

In all cases, Maponics defines a clean boundary to every polygon. Neighborhoods do not overlap in our dataset (though the macro- and sub- types overlay or underlay regular neighborhoods). Creating overlaps is easy enough to do via an algorithmic buffer.

Macro-Neighborhoods

A neighborhood may also have several names but the names don’t refer to the same geographic coverage (differing scale). For instance neighborhoods in Washington DC , such as Woodley Park, Cleveland Circle or Adams Morgan all are clearly bound by parks, streets, and streams, and are each unique in their housing, cultural and commercial nature. What these three neighborhoods have in common is that they are all located with the same regional neighborhood known as “Northwest” Washington. To support this geographic hierarchy Maponics identifies these regional neighborhoods as “macro-neighborhoods”.

Another common example of the macro-neighborhood to neighborhood relationship is that of the downtowns or business districts of large urban centers, where downtowns commonly contain numerous distinct neighborhoods. Seattle’s “downtown” neighborhood (a Maponics macro-neighborhood) contains the six individual neighborhoods of Belltown, Downtown, Central Business District, Yesler Terrace, International District, and Pioneer Square.

Some general rules:

• Macro-neighborhoods are generally large (somewhere between 4 and 20 total for a large city).
• A macro-neighborhood cannot split a neighborhood. That is, a neighborhood cannot fall part in one macro-neighborhood, part in another.
• A macro-neighborhood may have no neighborhoods but a macro-neighborhood cannot have only sub-neighborhoods. In other words, if an area has a macro- and a sub-, then it must also have a neighborhood.
• Macro-neighborhoods cannot cross each other.

Sub-Neighborhoods

As you can well imagine the “local” definition of a neighborhood can vary significantly as we look across the country. In cities like Baltimore and other east coast cities, neighborhoods traditionally have been defined along ethnic and cultural lines – Little Italy, Polish Town, and Chinatown. These traditional neighborhoods can vary significantly in size ranging from a few city blocks to several square miles. In large urban areas such as New York, small neighborhoods exist within larger ones. Alphabet City in Manhattan falls within the larger neighborhood of Lower East Side. Expanding the neighborhood hierarchy we introduce the concept of the “sub-neighborhood”, resulting in a neighborhood classification for Alphabet City of:

• Macro-neighborhood: Downtown
• Neighborhood: Lower East Side
• Sub-neighborhood: Alphabet City

As we move west into the Sun Belt, neighborhoods are more commonly defined by the developments and growth in that area, where the development names, as often proposed by the developer at the time of permitting, become the defacto neighborhood names. Names such as Sweetwater Estates, Thunderbird Quail Run, Parklinks at Alta Mesa, and Fairview Meadows are some common examples. Within the neighborhood hierarchy these developments constitute a standard neighborhood.

Often the build out of these developments occur in stages, or may contain sections that are built by different developers and accessed as separate areas. Over time, as these areas are populated homeowners groups form and neighborhood names change. To accommodate this neighborhood evolution within planned communities, Maponics utilizes the sub-neighborhood classification. A simple example in Scottsdale, Arizona is the Heritage developments which consist of 4 individual clusters of homes that include Heritage Village 1, 2, 3 and 4. All of these subdivisions are a part of the McCormick Ranch planned community. Each of these villages is classified as a sub-neighborhood of the McCormick Ranch neighborhood.

Some general rules:

• Sub-neighborhoods are generally very small.
• A sub-neighborhood cannot cross a neighborhood or a macro-neighborhood.
• Sub-neighborhoods cannot cross each other.

Do you have suggestions on how neighborhoods can be best classified? If so, share them here!

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