PolicyMap News

(Philadelphia) March 19, 2009- Airing tonight on ABC News is an interview with Jeremy Nowak, CEO and President of The Reinvestment Fund regarding the geography of the recession. ABC News was drawn to the employment data from TRF’s demographic data and mapping tool www.policymap.com that BusinessWeek had used to write several articles in the past few months on the same topic.

Where is the recession hitting hardest? Where might there be best opportunities? Why?

BusinessWeek used PolicyMap’s data and geographic information system to consider cities across the country that had high concentrations of jobs in “safe” industries, such as: healthcare, education, law, energy and the government. Based on this indicator, it posited that cities such as Arlington, VA; Washington, D.C.; Durham, NC; Madison, WI; Boston, MA; Pittsburgh, PA; Baltimore, MD; Baton Rouge, LA; New Orleans, LA; and Philadelphia, PA may be more recession-proof.

“We developed PolicyMap to help policymakers and others – including reporters – to have the ability to quickly access important, sometimes hard-to-understand data,” said Nowak.

Jeremy Nowak’s interview is being distributed by ABC News tonight. The original BusinessWeek.com articles, including a sideshow of all 20 cities, can be found at PolicyMap’s blog (http://blog.policymap.com/?p=1586) or at businessweek.com.

About PolicyMap

PolicyMap is an online mapping tool that makes it quick and easy to gather and analyze geocentric information such as demographics, real estate, crime statistics and more. PolicyMap is a service of The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a not-for-profit leader in the financing of neighborhood revitalization. TRF developed PolicyMap to empower decision makers with better access to credible market and demographic data. PolicyMap can be found online at www.policymap.com. To learn more abut TRF, visit www.trfund.com.

The REST is Up to You: A Deeper GeoStack for Better Apps

The free mapping APIs have generated a tidal wave of interest, a flood of interesting mashups, and a trickle of genuinely new useful applications. While developers have pushed the limits of what is possible, progressively fewer meaningful new features have been introduced to the free APIs.

This presentation highlights the capabilities of the Pushpin REST API by showing a live demonstration of PolicyMap, a web application used by policymakers and Real Estate developers to support the real world decisions that they make on a daily basis.

From Launch Pad at O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Burlingame, CA, May 12, 2008.