Maponics Blog

Cool news! If you are signed up for our quarterly updates, your neighborhood coverage just got 50% greater! Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries version 1.8.3, released today, features over 30,000 unique neighborhood boundaries in 1763 US cities and 241 metro areas. Plus we’ve now got over 30 cities in Canada! The a la carte product suite includes not only boundary data, but also centroids, neighborhood names, cross reference files for up-to-date ZIP Code lookups, and alternate name tables. You ... [read more]

Have you ever had one of those “Wow, if I had only known this existed” moments? Well unless you’re a direct mail veteran, a visit to the USPS’s Business 101 section will leave you feeling that way. There you’ll find a ton of handy tips, resources and tools to help you mail smart and make more money. Two of the best interactive tools are the mailing Decision Tree and the direct mail Business Price Calculator. Just input the details of your mailing, and the Decision Tree (note: works b... [read more]

Thanks to a huge surge in customers, we have four new positions open! Interested in joining us here at Maponics? We’re looking for exceptional people to fill these roles: Account Executive This outbound individual will be creating new business opportunities; they’ll also be a touchstone for existing GIS Data customers. Learn more! Production Cartographer Be part of the exciting team maintaining and developing the popular Maponics’ Neighborhood Spatial Database. Are you resourcefu... [read more]

I admit it. We’ve cut corners on client mapping projects. Left off a compass rose here. Skipped a label optimization there. Little things that any cartographer worth her salt would know from Cartography 101 shouldn’t be dropped. [A great discussion got started last week here about the look and feel of maps and cartography vs. GIS vs. web mapping. But read below for a more practical view.] But the truth is, in those cases our client didn’t care about compass roses (or whatev... [read more]

Two cartographers have joined our neighborhood data team recently, and we want to tell you about them! Eric Ballou hails from Chicago and has been living and working in Vermont since 2000. On weekends, you can find him hiking the Green Mountains, reading fiction and philosophy, or listening to Cubs games. Mike Murphy is originally from the Albany, NY area, but now lives in Fairlee, VT. He also enjoys the outdoors, as well as cooking and travel. In the short time they’ve been with Maponi... [read more]

We are excited to announce that Mark Friend has joined our team as Director of Sales. In addition to a strong tennis game, Mark brings with him 15 years of technical sales and sales management experience. This includes a substantial background in geospatial technologies, as Director of Sales & Business Development at Tactician and Director of Strategic Sales at Vicinity. In the short term, Mark will focus on working with our sales team to expand our presence in the industries we already serv... [read more]

Another site that I check out when I can is The Map Room. This is a fascinating blog about maps and anything to do with mapping. The author, Jonathan Crowe, has been blogging since 2003. His frequent posts cover an enormous range of topics, from basic mapping news, to map-related artwork, to satellite imagery and current events. Jonathan is in tune with the fact that we are all pressed for time, and his pieces are generally short. He makes an immediate case for why you, the reader, may find th... [read more]

As those of you who are die-hard GIS types know, the Census Bureau recently released a new set of their map data. One great new aspect of this data is that it now comes in shapefile format! It also appears that they have updated several counties worth of streets for improved alignment. Unfortunately, for their ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (the U.S. Census Bureau’s ZIP Code proxy) they have attributed everything to the 2000 release (which was compiled in 1998-1999). Since that’s 10 yrs... [read more]