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August 2009 |
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1. Thanks for an Outstanding First Half of the Year |
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We would like to send a big thank you to all our clients and partners, old and new, for placing their trust in us. We have acknowledged them in our growing list of clients. Thanks to you we have achieved the biggest first half of the year since the company's inception.
Our commitment is to keep working hard developing the best mapping solutions money can buy. |
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2. Time to Get Your Business Ready! |
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| Expert economists say that companies coming out on top during the bull market are those taking steps to position themselves when the market is at its weakest. This makes a lot of sense. Now that everyone is talking about green shoots, swift action is crucial to preparing your company. |
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| These times do not call for frivolous expenses, of course, but the time is always right to think about your business and how you are going to better serve your clients when the market improves. Obviously your best approach is to proceed with caution and always look after your ROI (return of investment). However, when you think about it, now is one of the best moments to invest we have had in years. | |  | We know it is not an easy decision, but every single dollar you put in your company, if invested wisely, will have a great return when the economy recovers.
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| Let us help you get your products and/or services into your clients' hands. Make it as easy as possible for your prospective clients to find what you offer. Now is the time to replace that endless list of dealership pages with an elegant, intuitive, and fun-to-use map. Put yourself in your client's shoes for a moment. If you are looking for store locations on a web site, and a traditional list appears, chances are your clients will be less captivated by the results than they would be if viewing similar information on a dynamic map. |
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| Our prices seem all the more reasonable if one takes into account our personalized service, sleek technology, and top-notch support. The expanding list of clients using our solutions can attest to this fact. Furthermore, we can be flexible when it comes to payment, to accommodate your needs. We want to help you be in a good competitive position when the economy rebounds. Call us at 1-866-392-0071 and let us show you what we can do for your business. |
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3. Let Us Build the Custom Project You Have in Mind |
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| At Flashmaps we have always been available for developing custom mapping solutions. Since all our systems, back-end and front-end, have been developed in house from scratch, we are fully able to develop whatever functionality you might require. Aside from the support we provide, we believe this capability is our largest assets. |
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Over the last few months we have built several great custom projects. Key features include: displaying the temperature of the ocean, calculating the magnetic heading from one point to another (by applying magnetic declination to each point on earth), displaying live traffic information, etc. |
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| These are just a few examples. With our mapping software expertise and your insight of your business, we can build the perfect system. We can assist you in putting together that missing piece you always dreamed of, which could help give you that distinct competitive advantage. |
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If there are maps involved, whether they be of the whole world or just a small geographical area, or even just a floor plan, call us and spend a few minutes talking to one of our highly qualified associates, who will provide you with all of the options available. Their job is to help steer you to the best and most affordable solution. We bet we can!
We will be pleased to listen to your ideas at 1-866-392-0071. |
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4. Product Enhancements |
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| At Flashmaps we are always improving our product line. New features usually come about due to clients' new requirements or suggestions. It is very useful and encouraging for us to listen to all of the feedback we receive from our clients on how they would like their project to work. We are all only too familiar with that proverbial "Why didn't we think of that before?" moment! |
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| These are some of the latest enhancements available in our products: |
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| AreaSelector: POI and text collisions detection. If you deploy POIs or texts on top of any flavor of AreaSelector, now the system checks if they collide with one another, hiding the least relevant ones. |
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| All products: re-cycle your Excel-spreadsheets data. In the past many clients have reached us asking how they could use data from the Excel documents they maintain regularly, instead of using 'real' databases. We now offer them an option to do so by including an XML-Export button in your spreadsheet. This retrieves all the updated data, and creates a valid XML file to populate your map. A great solution, if you don't have too many IT resources to work on your mapping project. |
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| AreaSelector: Mercator projection available. Any AreaSelector is now available in Interrupted Goode Homolosine (IGH) or Mercator projection. While IGH is great for mapping any area in the Americas, Mercator is better suited for the whole world or any area outside of the Americas. Check out the differences in the graphic below. |
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| All products: new full-screen mode. Now all our products can benefit from the hardware-based full-screen mode implemented in Flash Player 9 and higher versions. By clicking an ad-hoc button, visitors can enlarge their map to full screen, just like with YouTube videos, for example. Get back to the regular view by pressing Esc key or clicking another ad-hoc button. |
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| AreaSelector: display images over the map. You can now display any kind of geo-referenced images on top of your map. For example, rain radar images, water temperature, etc. |
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| AreaSelector: new enhanced world cities database. We have just finished the in-house compilation of a very useful database containing the 200,000 largest cities around the world. Each city is associated to its province/state and country in the cartography, which allows a greater versatility of integration when applying filters to your project. |
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| AreaSelector: USA place divisions. AreaSelector, our large-scale mapping solution, now adds USA place divisions to the long list of supported standard coverages. So now you can choose from any of these: continents, countries, states/provinces, counties, zip codes, congressional districts, upper/lower house districts, MSAs, CBSAs, DMAs, USA places and townships... You name it. Combinations of any of these are available, as are other options like roadways, railways, custom areas, etc. |
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| All products: personalized admins. If the upkeep of your data and maps through a traditional database appears to be a daunting task, we can work to build an interactive back-end system to edit the colors, content, text and overall appearance of your map. Contact us for more information. |
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5. Case Study: RebateRentals.com |
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| RebateRentals.com Realty, Inc. is a customer-focused residential-leasing firm that offers a complimentary blend of traditional personal services (brick and mortar) with the convenience of an Internet-based company model. Their goal was to create a service platform that would help redefine how renting a property would be done for each of the leasing participants. |
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| This is how they see our relationship: |
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| Based on our research, a community-based model provided the best balance between detail and generality, wherein the lowest common denominator for our platform was to market and brand communities, not specific addresses within that community. Therefore, from the company's inception the firm began to immediately depart from the typical real-estate firm, that proclaims to market a specific address as a unique product of one, to a product of many within a branded container called the community. Furthermore, that branding effort at the community level would occur in perpetuity regardless of inventory available at given point of time. In turn, this paradigm shift helped our target market process and digest a larger amount of content in a shorter period of time. Our customers' feedback spoke of a much more efficient experience without the distraction of useless or misplaced content. |
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With our primary market strategy in place, we now needed the tool(s) to implement our plan: developing the first successful community-based real-estate corporation to intentionally brand individual rental areas as distinct and defined communities, thus departing from the individual "market of one" concept that prevails today. Concurrently, we needed to develop a relevant suite of tools to leverage this new paradigm into a relevant online platform. |
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| Along came Flashmaps |
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| After many months of research, trial and error with other solution providers, a serendipitous discovery of Flashmaps occurred one late evening. I was immediately intrigued by their approach to a dynamic data driven mapping platform now becoming prevalent among real-estate search providers. We initially started slow with some of their more basic, off-the-shelf DB Mapper products, while testing what I term the "stickiness" effect on customer use and perception of the Internet platform we were developing with Flashmaps. |
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| Flashmaps is transforming us from a website into an application platform |
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| Over the span of a few months Flashmaps changed from a third party vendor into an integral part of the Rebate organization, a strategic partner who listens to our business goals and needs, and takes the time to understand their relevance within the context of our business. Specifically, Flashmaps has been instrumental in getting RebateRentals.com closer to our goal of defining ourselves as the market leader in community-based, real-estate branding, along with the appropriate Internet-based tools, thus evolving from a website frame into a powerful real-estate application. Some examples include: |
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| - Dynamic-data driven mapping systems< |
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| - Back-end SearchMap administrative tool(s) |
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| - Content management module |
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| - Our unique SearchMap interface |
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| - Deal of the Day marketing module |
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| - End user tools for community rental ad module for landlords post and community bid module, for renters to bid on specific properties |
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| - Craigslist template generator, where users can generate custom-html based ads in just a few clicks |
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| - Landlord Eprompt features, to remind landlords of upcoming vacancies and to automate the re-posting of previous community rental ads |
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| - Renter Eprompt alerts for requested community floor plans
- Integrated web video |
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- Decision support systems (in future modules) |
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| The feedback loop |
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Two very important metrics have changed in sales revenue and customer retention. Although it is sometimes hard to measure the efficacy of a particular initiative, reasonable co-relations can be establishedthrough customer-feedback and internet-usage patterns observed over time. Our experience shows a number of both qualitative and quantitative benefits from our efforts with Flashmaps. The following have increased:
- return visits to RebateRentals.com
- browsing times on RebateRentals.com
- referrals from past customers linking our site to others
- brand loyalty in general |
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| A number of our customers have actually taken the time to compliment our efforts, wherein one hears customers detail specific attributes of our SearchMap application, as if they were present in the board room during the brain storm and specification phases of our project. Aaron Houser, president and founder of RebateRentals.com, commented: "It felt like we knocked the cover off the proverbial base ball when customers came in praising how intuitive our SearchMap interface operated - declaring it 'frictionless' by some accounts. They obviously got it, they connected with what we intended, and without prompt or mention... a tremendous feeling that made hundreds of hours worthwhile. RebateRentals.com definitely has a number of major milestones to declare temporary victory over its three key objects, but now it certainly has some momentum with the help of Flashmaps". |
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| RebateRentals.com sees Flashmaps as a part of its strategic success. We share ideas and work toward mutual success. Simply put, working with Flashmaps is not a necessary evil; it is just necessary for the success of our Internet platform. Web based, customized, dynamic-data driven mapping is now a core strategy to the success of any serious online real-estate business. We feel Flashmaps is a leader in this niche, and is dedicated to staying in the forefront as a pure play dynamic mapping provider. |
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| Flashmaps has consistently delivered the right set of skills, creativity, and passion to see each project milestone to fruition, reasonably on time, and on budget. It is not every day you find a vendor who cares about your success and takes personal pride in what they do. RebateRentals.com is proud to display the Flashmaps logo on our site and. In return we our proud to see Flashmaps receive recognition as a leader in dynamic flash-driven content mapping. |
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