Deloitte designates “Geospatial Visualization” as one of the top Tech Trends this year…and we’ve got it

Remember all those years of geography you studied in grammar school and high school poring over maps, globes and textbooks?

Those classes certainly instilled in students a fascination with the world and distant lands.

But underneath all those discussions about the Himalayas, the Great Wall in China and Machu Picchu in Peru, there is an underlying lesson that is resurfacing.

Geography matters.

If you look at your smart phone or Google’s home page, you can see how technologists realize this as well.

Now it seems that most searches and information on your computer or your smart phone are somehow tied into location. Even social networking has a location element that lets you know where your friends are or where they’ve been.

It’s called geospatial visualization. And it’s going to be big in the next decade.

The famous consulting company, Deloitte, recently cited geospatial visualization as one of the top Tech Trends of 2012. These guys are smart, they know how to see the writing on the wall before it’s even written.

Their article stated: “The human brain is naturally wired to process visual images by recognizing patterns, inferring relationships and discerning features. Analytic visualization connects these perceptual and cognitive strengths with modern statistical computing capabilities and can enable decision makers to pull significant results quickly out of tremendous volumes of complex and diverse data.”

Let me put this into layman’s terms for you – data integrated into a map is better for consumers.

And this is catching on big time.

It makes sense. With modern computing and the incredible capability of chips, processors and web connectivity, there’s a boatload of data that is available.

Take SpatialMatch for example. Our hyper-local database contains millions of home listings, homes not-for-sale, public records, 130,000 schools and 12 million businesses. An IDX database combined with lifestyle information to give home buyers everything they need in one place.

Throwing all that info at a home buyer on a web site would be like tossing a giant pie of pixels in their face. Yuck.

So we made it geospatial – enabling users to pick and choose what part of that database they wanted to show on a map. For every market in the US.

This location-based visualization is trending now, and will probably be tied into just about everything that has to do with anything in the future.

Embedding this capability on your real estate web site is going to give you a tremendous advantage in your local market.

Here’s are a few examples of how you can use it:

a)     Send screen shots to prospects – consumers are already attuned to this new trend in mapping, so it will immediate make sense to them and let them know you have the latest located-based technology.

b)     Market your site as geo-spatial based – looking for a unique selling proposition – here’s one.

c)     Go social with it – every time you point out something on Facebook or Twitter, use a link to your map from SpatialMatch.

d)     Etc., Etc. Etc.

This is a new reality folks. The amount of data that can be processed on the web today is astronomical.

The key, as Deloitte points out, it’s not how much you have, it’s how you display it; how you tie it into a consumer’s location.

To read Deloitte’s report on Geospatial Visualization and other trends click here.

To see the SpatialMatch geospatial application for real estate sites, look here.