Company: MetaCarta, Inc.
Industry: Geocoding
Location: Cambridge, MA, United States of America

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Lisa Allocca

Red Javelin Communications, Inc.

978-470-2227

lisa@redjavelin.com">lisa@redjavelin.com

MetaCarta Introduces GeoTagger OnDemand for Digital Publishers

YourStreet Transforms Local News using MetaCarta

Cambridge, Ma, – February 4, 2008 –MetaCarta®, Inc., the leading provider of geographic search and referencing solutions, today announced GeoTagger OnDemand, a hosted service for digital publishers that identifies the places and points-of-interest mentioned in text documents, web pages and blogs, and relates them to their appropriate latitude and longitude coordinates, which enables them to be automatically displayed on maps, retrieved through a variety of search agents, or dynamically displayed with other geographically relevant content.  GeoTagger OnDemand is a cost-effective fully hosted solution that is ideal for digital publishers who want to geographically display or localize content without having to make a big upfront investment. Hyper-localized content draws users back to the publisher’s site for repeat visits, substantially increasing user frequency and page views metrics, enabling publishers to better capture advertising dollars and maximize advertising rates.

YourStreet (located at http://www.yourstreet.com) is the first customer to use GeoTagger OnDemand. YourStreet links news stories to places, and combines it with a neighborhood social network.  The web site aggregates stories from 10,000+ newspapers, magazines, and local blogs and then displays them on a map. The service is free. Once users are registered, they can begin "conversations" about places in their area and connect with other neighbors who have signed up for the service and may live near them.

“YourStreet is transforming the way users experience local news by indexing and mapping thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level. We scan thousands of newspaper sites and local blogs each day and use MetaCarta to help with location identification,” explains James Nicholson, CEO and founder at YourStreet.

GeoTagger OnDemand uses MetaCarta’s proprietary natural language processing and Geographic Data Module (“GDM”) technology to indentify and disambiguate geographic references and resolve the geographic meaning and location intended by the author. Based on MetaCarta’s market leading geoparsing and geotagging technology, GeoTagger OnDemand generates valuable geographic metadata from a publisher’s content, making it actionable by other applications and users.

Features include:

·        Retrieves Geographic Information from Content - GeoTagger OnDemand identifies the places mentioned in your content, in near real time, making it easy for you to leverage the resulting geo-metadata to quickly localize content.

·        Hosted Service - GeoTagger OnDemand is a data & software-as-a-service (DSaaS) model that offers rapid implementation and flexible scalability. Additionally, customers do not need to install any hardware or software on premises and there is no substantial up front investment.

·        Scalable - GeoTagger OnDemand Service is charged on a transactional basis, so the customer’s expenses scale proportionally to the value provided by the service.

·        Fast and Easy -  A full suite of APIs make it fast and easy for GeoTagger OnDemand customers to integrate the geographic metadata with their applications and web sites.

“One of the great values of our OnDemand service is that they make it possible for us to rapidly deploy enhancements to both the logic and data that are the underpinnings of our core technology.  By hosting these services in our data centers we are able to provide publishers with extremely rapid deployment, and also implement changes in minimal time,” said Rick Hutton, Vice President of Content Services at MetaCarta.

GeoTagger OnDemand is available immediately.

About MetaCarta

MetaCarta, Inc., is the leading provider of geographic search and referencing solutions. MetaCarta products make data and unstructured content “location-aware” making that information geographically relevant. Using a map interface, these innovative solutions make it possible for customers to discover, visualize, and act on important location-based information. Founded by a team of MIT researchers in 2001, MetaCarta is privately held, with US headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts and offices in Vienna, Virginia and Houston, Texas and resellers worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.metacarta.com or MetaCarta Resource Center.

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MetaCarta is a trademark of MetaCarta, Incorporated. All other product or corporate references may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Lisa Allocca (lisa@redjavelin.com)
Phone: 978-470-2227