CUPERTINO, Calif., Sept. 10, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ZeeMaps (http://www.zeemaps.com), a service from Zee Source, Inc., allows publishers to easily create interactive and print maps. Maps enrich textual narratives involving locations, e.g., crime stories, restaurant reviews, or housing market trends.
Journalists and news writers routinely create maps on the ZeeMaps server, and publish them in their own web pages. Changes to the map are automatically reflected in the published map. ZeeMaps users have marked more than seven million entries on over a hundred thousand maps.
"ZeeMaps is an essential part of our toolset at wired.com," said Pamela Statz, Managing Editor of Wired Digital. "With ZeeMap's simple and user-friendly tools, editors and writers can quickly add interactive, user-generated maps to news and magazine stories."
Often, maps created using ZeeMaps are "the story". For instance, wired.com created a map of the network performance experienced by world-wide users of Apple's iPhone. The map was created by wired.com from global user submissions. The resulting news story was nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) award.
"Five months ago, toledoblade.com began using ZeeMaps for an interactive map that plots local crimes," said Luann Sharp, Asst. Managing Editor, The Blade of Toledo, Ohio. "The information on the crimes is collected by newsroom staff every week and submitted for plotting in an Excel file. The end result is very user-friendly."
The Blade also uses ZeeMaps to publish a map for their print edition, derived from the online version.
ZeeMaps is a unique service, providing:
-- Scalability: maps made through ZeeMaps can have a few markers or tens of thousands of markers, and the service displays all markers in a split-second. Users can easily create and maintain such maps through spreadsheets, including direct import from Google Spreadsheets.
-- Custom Fields: entries on maps have user-defined custom fields that provide analytical distance search, e.g., Indian restaurants around the zip code 95014.
-- Printable images: ZeeMaps offers PDF or JPEG images of customized user maps in different sizes and resolution. The high-resolution maps are suitable for publication in paper editions.
"Until recently, interactive and print maps were available only at a high cost for newspapers and other organizations. With ZeeMaps, we provide better functionality at a fraction or no cost," said Dr. Pankaj K. Garg, President of Zee Source. "Users can create and customize ZeeMaps themselves, without any programming or IT support."
About The Blade: The Blade is an award-winner newspaper located in Toledo, Ohio, with a daily circulation of about 120,000 and a Sunday circulation of about 140,000. The toledoblade.com site averages 6.4 million page views a month.
About Wired.com: Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what's next, delivering the most original and complete take you'll find anywhere on innovation's impact on technology, science, business and culture. Wired.com is part of the Conde Nast Digital Business Group.
About Zee Source: Zee Source is a Silicon Valley based software development company, with a mission to help organizations adopt Open Source software tools. Zee Source develops and operates ZeeMaps: a web application that allows users to easily create and publish customized maps.