Esri is pleased to announce that Esri Story Maps has won the Gold Medal award for Best Digital Map Product and Best Overall Map Product at the International Map Industry Association (IMIA)—Americas conference. Esri Story Maps' ability to easily serve maps and accurate demographic information covering a wide range of topics along with its well-crafted cartography were top reasons the application won the awards.

IMIA held the conference September 9–11, 2012, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with attendees involved in all aspects of the mapping industry. A select group of industry leaders attending the conference judged the competition.

"Storytelling is rapidly becoming one of the most important reasons that organizations use web maps," said Allen Carroll, program manager for ArcGIS Online content and team lead for Esri Story Maps. "The result is that GIS is emerging from the back office and becoming accessible—and useful—to everyone. The need for GIS to analyze, plan, manage, and support decisions remains vital, but organizations now perceive the need to tell the story of their analyses, plans, and decisions."

Esri Story Maps combines narration and rich media content in interactive maps to help people discover and understand patterns and relationships that exist in the world. Esri began producing the story maps to support storytelling techniques, tools, and best practices. These story maps have spurred the development of templates and other resources, and now GIS professionals, web developers, graphics specialists, and others, build and publish their own story maps.

One example is US Agency for International Development (USAID), which recently released development data—including guarantees, loans disbursed, and available financing—in a story map. By displaying information in this manner, complex data can be viewed together, providing better insight for the private sector to explore new areas for collaboration with host countries, researchers, development organizations, and the public.

To view or make your own story map, visit Esri Story Maps.

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Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.

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