The Power of Maps (Bing Maps)
Wow, there’s some really cool stuff going on at Microsoft right now. After seeing two videos of Blaise Aguera y Arcas introducing the cool things they’re doing at Microsft’s Bing Maps and their Photosynth and SeaDragon technology, I am floored by what the future holds for maps. Of course, we’d love for Bing to use our Factle Neighborhood Boundary Data as well,… Microsoft, what are you waiting for! =)
From TED just this past February, Bing Maps for the future!
From TED 2007, on Photosynth and SeaDragon
Neighborhoods as to Restaurants and Menu Search
One of the best inventions of all time is food. We should thank God that He made food so tasty and enjoyable! Good food and fellowship always make my day, and you would probably agree as most people aren’t like Smeagol in Lord of the Rings where he is disgusted by Sam Gamgee cooking up all that good food!
So on the topic of food is restaurants and restaurant search. The web has made search an incredible tool to find things. Before we would have to ask our friends and listen up for recommendations. However, today we just hope onto our computers and do a search for “Tasty Chinese Food,” or “Gourmet But Cheap Italian.” It’s just so easy especially with all the new restaurant review sites, from Yelp.com, to UrbanSpoon, to Menuism, and more are popping up all the time!
One of my favorite websites is OpenTable. Now, OpenTable isn’t necessarily like those listed above, because it focuses on providing the service of reservations and not reviews. But in a similar way, all of these websites have one thing in common asides from food… which is they are about location. These aren’t just reviews about food like in a cookbook, but they are reviews of restaurants and reservations for restaurants.
When we talk about Local, we are talking about neighborhoods. If you want to search for a restaurant, you will often search for it in your neighborhood. Why? It has something to do with familiarity, or distance, or even the feel and vibe; we just have an affinity to it.
I’ve been talking to some of these web entrepreneurs about the idea of integrating neighborhood data into their restaurant review website. They need a way for people to sift and sort, to filter their search results to enhance user experience. This is because people have come to expect it, and there’s just a great need for it since in a given city, there can be a lot of restaurants to choose from.
The best examples are these. Let’s say you want to eat some Chinese food. You search for it, and you get 50, 100, or more results. Let’s say you don’t have a car, and you want to walk to something in your neighborhood, or maybe you’re a veteran and you know the good stuff is found in Chinatown. So by using neighborhoods, you get a more refined and focused search result, and you get a better understanding of what you’re going to get as well.
Another interesting thing that came up was that I had to tell them the truth of what I thought about neighborhood data. Neighborhood Data has different uses, and you have to manipulate it to cater to your needs. If you are a search engine you may want as many neighborhoods as you can, because you want to capture the entire possible market of search and find the things that are relevant.
However, if you are a restaurant review website, the break down of neighborhoods only matters in large cities. This is because you can reference the suburbs as “neighborhoods” and you don’t need to break those smaller cities down into neighborhoods. People aren’t going to be searching for those names, and you don’t want to have search results so minuscule that it defeats the purpose of sorting.
So the question is: can you justify the incremental cost with real value? What kind of neighborhood data are you looking for, and how do you want it to impact your customers to give them real added value and satisfaction? These are just some of the questions that need to be weighed. But for now, let’s just enjoy the food!
Factle's Bernt Wahl Speaks at UC Berkeley's CITRIS
Today our CEO Bernt Wahl gave a presentation about the importance of neighborhood data and its impact. The talk was given at UC Berkeley’s CITRIS, which stands for “Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.” Bernt covered different topics from Real Estate and Foreclosures, to Public Health and the Spread of Diseases, and of course… our project of mapping out neighborhoods and their boundaries.
Needless to say, it was great! Not because there was free food there (which I gladly enjoyed!), but because there were so many who joined to find out why neighborhoods are so important. If you missed it, you can check it out here: http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-Feb10
The video is also provided below.
Neighborhoods as to Crime
Crime is something we don’t often talk about a lot, but it’s something that we often have to talk about and are extremely interested in. Typically, the discussion of crime arises when something happens in our neighborhood. Crime breaks down into multiple forms: such as crime of theft, assault, murder, and even rape. But like said, crime as it is attributed to neighborhood is the most relevant. It’s relevant because that’s where we live, it’s where our children go to school, it’s where we frequent, it’s where we build our community and networks, and it’s where want to feel safe and at home.
There is no question that mapping has become an important source of visual information, and the ability to access these forms of data information has only increased the past few years. Many poeple have heard about Chicago Crime Map and the much celebrated Everyblock. There’s now more local crime watch websites popping up too, such as Oakland Crimespotting. And now, there are the the up and coming national crime watch websites like CrimeReports.com and CrimeMapping.com, which would only allow the public to have greater access to being able to analyze crime on a larger scale.
With this in mind, how would we want to view data about crime in our neighborhood? If that’s the most relevant data to us, hopefully it’s with neighborhood boundary data, because from it you will be able to generate accurate demographic data about neighborhood regions and also pull up relevant crime reports. Like we said in a previous post, neighborhoods are broken down often times by natural boundaries. By natural boundaries we mean freeways, rivers, mountains, etc. So as you would imagine, crime is very different on one side of the freeway and the other, and like wise, it’s very different in one part of town and another.
I always find it really jarring when I see the vast difference in some neighboring neighborhoods. One might get off the subway amongst a busy river of people shopping the big department stores, walk a few blocks, and all of a sudden be in one of the most impoverished parts of town. That was my experience when I ended up in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. But this is commonplace in almost every large city, such as Palo Alto in California where on one side you have Stanford University and East Palo Alto on the other side where there is so much crime.
At Factle Maps, we know that neighborhood correlations between different attributes are very significant. Crime is related to concentration of wealth and poverty as much as housing prices often times have to do with school districts. If we take neighborhood data, we will be able to do better research and find better solutions to the problems in our neighborhood. But the challenge thus would be implentation and how to see successful changes.
To be continued…
An example of mapping crime by neighborhood from the UK
Press Release: Get Hyper(Local) with Neighborhoods
Neighborhood Boundaries and Demographics as a Means to Build Successful Solutions
BERKELEY, CA (January 12, 2010) – Factle Maps Corp., a pioneer and provider of neighborhood boundary and neighborhood demographic data, announced today that with the start of the New Year, Factle is offering its matching demographic data free of charge, for a limited time, alongside the corresponding unique Factle US Neighborhood Boundary Dataset. The dataset covers the majority of major US cities, totaling over 13,000 polygons with non-overlapping distinct boundary lines; allowing for location segmentation with clearly defined results.
According to Factle Researchers, developers will be enabled to build powerful applications using Factle’s Neighborhood Dataset to perform geocentric searchs within such as Chinatown, SoHo, or Nob Hill; thus giving better search results by segmenting the vast results from a large city. A common example is reducing the search results of pizza restaurants in San Francisco to pizza restaurants in the Mission District. Thus by manipulating the parameters, you gain better results. The ability to visually access search results would also allow end users to gain improved location based insights.
The bonus in the current package of neighborhood boundary data comes in the form of demographic data. The demographic data corresponds with the neighborhood polygons, and thus would allow those curious, like home buyers or the general public, the ability to know quantitatively “their neighborhood.” The demographic data would also serve corporations and researchers alike to gain greater insight through analytics. “The neighborhood is one of the most homogeneous unit one can glean data and information from,” says Bernt Wahl, CEO of Factle Maps, “thus with these results we will be able to better understand our world through the local context, and through the process build better solutions and make wiser decisions.”
Factle’s neighborhood demographic data comes with almost 130 different categories ranging from income range, education level, population number, and even the number of people who ride motorcycles to work. With neighborhood boundaries coupled with demographic data, Factle hopes to provide a better perspective on the identity of a neighborhood than just its name.
About Factle Maps Corporation
Factle Maps (www.factle.com) is a mapping company that specializes in the creation of location based geo-data, with its main focus on neighborhood boundary identification. It all began with a dream to identify and map out every neighborhood in the world and making what was once so elusive become something that can be found, identified, and quantified.
Factle Maps is located in Berkeley, CA, right next to the UC Berkeley campus. Factle offers neighborhood boundary data and corresponding demographic data, as well as other geospatial mapping services. Factle has also worked with many researchers and start-ups, as well as large corporations such as Ask.com. To inquire more about Factle’s products and services, including neighborhood boundary data for US and international cities, email info@factle.com or visit www.factle.com
Company Contact:
Hartie Chang
hartie@factle.com
(510) 647-9206
www.factle.com
Neighborhoods as to Public Health & the Spread of Disease
There’s been a lot of research being used by Universities and other institutions by using neighborhood data. Like mentioned before, neighborhood data is valuable because of its consistency of a number of elements within it.
Your response to this is probably, “Wat you talk’n ’bout, Willis?” And you’d probably be correct in asking, because generally we only think of neighborhoods as a location with a name and with a certain feel. So to explain it more, we’re going to use Public Health as an example of why neighborhood data is a powerful tool to solving society’s many problem.
Public health is a big importance factor for us, especially as Americans. There’s a kazillion dollars going into health care, medicine, and health research. So public health is important to us not only because we want to be healthy, want to have as many people healthy as possible and prevent danger before it comes, but also because there’s a great amount of tax dollars and personal income at stake.
That’s where neighborhood data comes in. Neighborhoods define social interaction, or at least the daily and regular paths we take each and every day. Ever wondered why they quarantined people traveling around on planes during the H1N1 scare? It’s because disease spreads with the movement of people. And neighborhoods are the local context of how we travel and interact, and thus an important factor in the spread of diseases.
Here’s what I mean… Your neighborhood has a number of places where people within the community frequently venture to: the local grocery store, schools, churches, post office, gym, or whatever else it might be. At those locations, the social interaction between people are at the maximum high and the spread thus is equally the same. That’s how disease is spread within a neighborhood, until of course people move outside of that community area and interaction of sickly people reaches a tipping point somewhere else.
An example is this. At my church, a lot of our kids go to the same elementary school. One day we find out one church family has lice, apparently because the kid got lice from what seems like a lice epidemic at the elementary school. So it already spread at the elementary school, but now before we knew it, other families at church were catching the lice problem too because their kids play with each other at church. Thus we put on a quarantine of the known lice carriers, and that helped to put an end to it.
That was a small example, but you can see why and how disease spreads through communities. Much like how during the Swine Flu or H1N1, frequently what would occur was that one person in a family would catch it and thus the whole family would catch it because of frequent interaction. Thus schools and other neighborhood places that are the epicenter of social interaction within a larger community will be how diseases spread.
Lastly, this idea of neighborhoods being an important factor in the spread of diseases is not new. John Snow in the 1800′s plotted on a map of victims of cholera within a town and found that the concentration focused in at the town’s water well. Today our water well or city centers are far more and different, but in much in the same way, disease spreads within communities through their social interaction.
Neighborhoods as a Place of Identity
Neighborhoods are a fuzzy subject. Fuzzy because the boundaries are fuzzy, but also because the idea or concept of a neighborhood is quite fuzzy too. When we think about a neighborhood, let’s say SoHo in New York, or the Richmond District in San Francisco, we are talking about a place with a distinct quality to it. There’s the culture, the vibe so to speak, as we as the monuments or landmarks that make the place distinct and with a certain characteristic.
People generally also have a very personal feeling toward the neighborhood they live in. It’s like home turf for sports teams, or the school you went to, and maybe even your company that you work at (I suppose only if you love your job). It’s something people are proud of, the place they feel at home and loosened up, it’s something they want to tell people about, and it’s the context by which they share about their life.
Why do you think that is though? Why would people talk about their neighborhood, be possessive about it, rave about it? It has something to do with neighborhoods being the context of our social interactions and relationtionships, the by product of our everyday routes and routines, the playground of our lives so to speak.
When I talk to college students about their hometown, they will generally get excited when thinking about the place where they grew up, their “stomping grounds.” Yet, for some reason, typically when you go visit a friend to their home turf, they really only know a lot about their home turf, and not so much outside of it. What I mean is that it’s the place they frequent the most, whether it be the suburbs and the neighboring cities, or the neighborhoods in a large city. This is what I mean by social contexts, and the places where we frequent, because these largely form the neighborhood.
A neighborhood is only a neighborhood because of the people within it, because the people form the culture. When new and or young people move into a certain place, they change the culture and dynamics of a neighborhood, and often times this causes changes the boundaries of neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods will arise, and some will even cease to exist depending on how strongly correlated it is to the people living within it.
An example would be Chinatown. It’s only Chinatown because there are Chinese people who live there. There are Chinese stores everywhere, and so the culture is very much in agreement. However, let’s say that some other ethnic group begins to move in, then Chinatown may begin to shift in it’s identity. When the people move out, and eventually the landmarks such as the Chinese stores move out, then we will see a change in the neighborhood boundary.
Though, this is not to say that neighborhoods don’t exist for a long time. They often do, in some older cities like Chicago, for example, their neighborhoods have stayed consistent for many years. Which may mean that the culture within theses neighborhoods have stayed intact and mostly consistent as they have passed through multiple generations.
Factle Maps' New Website is Up!
Our new website is finally up! Check it out! www.factle.com
