Mapinfo

MapInfo supplies both desktop and Web-based GIS products. MapInfo Professional is a leading GIS desktop software package developed primarily for business and government applications. An old saying in the real estate business is that the three most important factors in housing value are location, location, location: MapInfo combined GIS technology with this concept and successfully developed and markets location-basedintelligence services to business and government users.

MapInfo was founded by four Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) students in 1986, starting as part of RPI's incubator program before becoming established as an independent company in Troy, New York. It was originally conceived as a navigational telematics company, but the company soon released a software product that became the first easy-to-use, affordable mapping program for the desktop computer. A key feature of MapInfo Professional today is that it continues to be relatively easy to learn, intuitive, and user-friendly. Consequently, novice users can quickly become sufficiently skilled in the software to begin using it.

Some of the areas where MapInfo is established as a leader in GIS services include the communications, education, finance, government, health care, hotel, insurance, media, mobile, real estate, restaurant, retail, and supermarket industries. Typical applications of MapInfo Professional include market analysis (e.g., mapping a store's customers to help define market area), site selection (e.g., choosing the optimal location of a new retail store based on meeting specific market criteria), address matching (e.g., mapping a medical clinic's patient database), and redistricting (for example, analyzing the effect of changing the size and shape of sales territories).

Although developed with business users in mind, MapInfo Professional shares many common GIS operations with other leading GIS software packages. These basic GIS functions include (a) the ability to use many common data and image file formats, such as delimited text files, Microsoft Excel files, database (.dbf) files, Microsoft Access files, and raster images, such as jpeg files; (b) selecting features and data (including geographic selections, e.g., selecting all point features within a specified area feature, and attribute selections, e.g., SQL filtering of attribute databases to select data meeting specified criteria); (c) buffering (creation of a polygon at a set distance from a selected point, line, or area feature; buffers are commonly used for spatial analysis; e.g., to find all customers within 1 mile of a store, a circular buffer with a 1-mile radius could be constructed around the store and all customers within the buffer selected using a geographic selection); (d) geocoding, the ability to map geographically referenced point data using geographic references such as street addresses, ZIP codes or latitude and longitude coordinates, and (e) thematic mapping (for example, ranged fill maps wherein colors or shades represent data ranges, graduated symbol maps wherein the size of a symbol is in proportion to the data value, and dot density maps wherein each dot in an area feature represents a data value).

MapInfo became a publicly traded company in 1994, and it is traded on NASDAQ as “MAPS.” In 2006, the company's net revenue was $165 million, and it had almost 900 employees.

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