What's New

What's New in BusinessMAP 4.5

BusinessMAP 4.5, the affordable database mapping and territory design application, offers all the great features of BusinessMAP 4, plus the following new additions.

• Map ChartsYou can add bar, pie, and value-sized pie charts to your map to further emphasize and compare data per area.

• Updated User Interface - New Windows XP style user interface.

• Updated Data - This includes updates to the map data, D&B business listings, and ESRI's demographic data estimates and projections, as well as the addition of world data.

• Free 30-Day Color Aerial Photo Subscription - You can now subscribe to a free 30-day subscription to i-cubed's aerial photography, as well as from Maptech.

• Application Programming Interface (API) - Create custom tools and applications via a COM API.

• Spider Diagrams - Also known as desire lines, spider diagrams depict a many to one relationship. For example, see which customers visit store A and store B, and examine customer locations relative to store locations and the distance between a customer location and a particular store location. Or examine competing products and see if there is a geographic correlation amongst the purchasers of those products.

• Spatial Calculator - The Spatial Calculator helps you build relatively equivalent territories based on common geography and a single specific variable. For example, if you have an ideal threshold in mind, such as total number of households, you may use this tool to select a group of geographic areas until that threshold is met for each territory.

You may use one of many variables attached to the geographic layer or from a database layer added to the map. The more probable variables would be area (square miles), population, number of current customers, and total current sales.

For example, you want to build a territory using various polygons of the same geography (states, counties, ZIP Codes, census tracts, etc.). You select the geography and variable field, and then use the ID tool to select polygons by clicking on them in the map. Multiple areas (counties, for example) are selected until the desired threshold is met. You may subtract a county to bring it back down closer to the threshold level, or you may add or subtract polygons to find the best group of polygons that is relatively equal to the predetermined value.

In some cases, you might have a region or territory where the value is currently less than that of another territory, but predicted to grow by 25% in the next year, so you can factor this into your total value. Once you are satisfied with the value/selection, you can click the Create Territory button and all selected or yellow polygons are made into a territory.

• Label Manager - This is a toolbar that enables you to quickly change the labels for any given layer. Change font type, style, size, and color without stepping through the edit layer wizard.

Note that when a font style (bold, italic, underline, or outline) is changed for a multi-class layer (cities, streets, rivers, etc.), the label change will affect all labels at all zoom levels for that layer. For example, at the USA level, the cities layer has labels bolded based on city population. If you change the font style to make all city labels bold, the differentiation will be lost. However, if you only change the font color or type (Aerial to Times Roman, for example), the differentiation will remain.

• Find Similar - This enables you to find an area with demographics similar to a selected area. An area may be any specific polygon of a polygonal layer (state, county ZIP Code, census tract, etc.) Choose up to three demographics and the desired threshold for each variable and BusinessMAP will find the most similar areas within the map view.