If Zillow is the best place for home buyers to find information about real estate, ZoomProspector hopes to become the best place for businesses to find information about where they should establish themselves geographically.
ZoomProspector aggregates information about various cities and communities – such as labor force sizes, unemployment rates, education levels, venture capital investments, and household incomes – and makes that info accessible through a map-based search tool. Queries are constructed around just the type of regions companies are looking for, whether those companies’ needs are related to labor force demographics or property availability.
Searches can also be modified for particular regions and cities. For example, if you’re a company looking for warehouses in San Francisco, you can search just for those. Two additional sections of the tool are also in development that will allow you to search for experts, just in case you’re having trouble finding the best sites for your company (physical sites, that is) on your own.
The main ZoomProspector tool simply represents search results as pins on a Google Map. However, if you stumble upon one of 160 special communities, you will be directed to a local site that can provide much more detailed information about a region using a custom map interface. These maps reveal data such as landmarks, airports, assembly plants, bus stops, fiber optics, golf courses, schools, and much more. It’s too bad that much of this rich information isn’t incorporated into one big mapping tool, but GIS Planning – the company behind ZoomProspector – says it isn’t opposed to such an idea.
ZoomProspector is currently in private beta but the first 10,000 visitors to use “zoomtech” as the registration code can sign up.