PolicyMap, a Wealth of Data at Your Fingertips

At the recent SocialDevCamp, one of the great points by Dave Troy was that we must really start to think a little more broad about the tech scene in our area.  He proposed a term “Amtrak Corridor” that basically represents the tech communities along the east coast to include Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC.

So while the stuff I cover here is really centered around the DC area, I took that to heart and was happy to see recently when a reader from the Philly area tipped me off to a new product released by TRF, The Reinvestment Fund, a leading non profit in revitalizing neighborhood revitalization.  The new product they released is called Policy Map, and their tag line:

• All the Data You Need
• All In One Place
• All Online

is absolutely true.  I got in and registered and played around and was amazed a the data I was able to pull together in such a short amount of time. In a matter of seconds I was able to outline my local Congressional District and layer on the per capita income.

Many in our area are in the PR, Social Media relations, and other fields where having good demographic information at their fingertips would be awesome.  Well now they do.  It is hard to even describe all that you can do, but the good folks at Policy Map have put together a great video demo of the featureset.

Go HERE to check it out.

This article by Jimmy which appeared on Eastcoast Blogging on July 8, 2008.