About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

Chris and I went to NYC for the Real Estate Connect Conference to try and learn more about the space and get some impressions on our technology. Since the release of the GeoIQ API we’ve gotten a good level of interest from real estate folks, and thought this would be a good opportunity to get smarter.

It was cool seeing all the interest in mapping and applications going on in the real estate space. Lots fo folks dropped by our pod and liked the idea of having data and analysis services for their mapping apps that would allow users to make better location decisions – good news for us. We did an integration of GeoIQ with Neighboroo.com for the conference that went really quick and smooth – just an hour or so worth of work. We’ll have some external examples of folks using GeoIQ for real estate shortly.

During the course of the first day booth visitors started asking us about pulling up the highly rated bars and singles heat map for NYC. Just so happened we had a KML files one of the Google Earth engineers sent us that mashed up bars and singles with our heat maps. After running through it with our conference visitors we decided to do a little field testing ourselves. Below is a screen shot from Google Earth of 600 bars (rated between 1 and 10) in NYC and the location of single women by census block.

From the high level it looked like the lower east side was where the action was at. Drop down another couple of zoom levels and we could see some specific hot spots pop out (the ability to export data and heat map analysis as KML, like you see above and below, will be part of the GeCommons release – we think it looks pretty cool):

Just so happened I was supposed to meet a buddy who lived down that way, so we now had the opportunity to see how hot the heat map really was. The buddy was Anthony Townsend currently at the IFTF. We’ve been doing various urban geography and technology projects for a while so it rounded out the field testing team well. We met up with Anthony at the Verlaine to grab a few beers and as we were walking out when we spotted Fat Baby next door. We’d been cracking jokes about the name since the NYC Bar data set was created. Just so happened it was right next door so we snapped a pic:

It was looking pretty dead on a Monday night so we headed on to get dinner at Schillers Liquor Bar – where according to Anthony you had to “cut through the super models with a machete”. It was a Monday but the place was still packed and definitely verifying the heat map. Between Verlaine and Schillers we’d gotten good beer and scenery. From Schillers we were off to meet up with a friend of Anthony’s (Justin Davila) at the Marshall Stack. We grabbed a round of beer and “holy double take Batman” Mike Myers and company sits down at the table next to us. 20/20 hindsight I should have snapped a picture, otherwise no one will believe Mr. Myers bought all our beers and said I could be the Austin Powers stunt double in the next movie. Ya – my camera phone conveniently did not work. None the less it definitely verified the heat map. So – the moral of the story is use GeoIQ and meet famous actors, super models, and become instantly cool with hipsters around the globe.

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