Having finished working on the backend and hosting infrastructure of the Mapumental technology last year, we started thinking about the products that should be built with it. To help us work this out, we talked to lots of people in sectors where journey times matter a lot: residential and commercial property, job search, tourism and public services. What we found is that while everyone loved the dynamic location search technology, there were many situations when people wanted to have a simple static map of commuting times.

We heard that these maps would be useful to individuals looking for jobs or property – but also organisations, from property sites to providers of public services, businesses and entertainment venues who’d like a map to put on their website and brochures, or to use in internal analysis.

At first we were surprised, but the more we thought about it, the more sense it made. Our search tool, which we are currently working on updating, serves a different purpose: it shows a combination of search criteria, including travel times, and lets the user play with different parameters interactively. But it did not provide a simple snapshot of travel times for a location, divided in bands which are very helpful in assessing commuting times. So we set out to make the map image service, which is what we launched yesterday.

This was not particularly straightforward to make, and there were many things to consider: how exactly should the shop work, and what should it offer people? We have settled on four core options for the standard maps: total time mapped, direction of travel (whether the location is where one arrives at, or departs from), arrival or departure time, and custom map title. These maps are really easy to order from the website, and we can make them very quickly.

Online ordering works really well for small quantities, but is not ideal for high-volume clients. So we also created a new API – a URL fetcher which allows to create maps in high quantities, as and when needed. These maps can be fully customised, from the choice of colours to number of bands and zoom levels.

The the very first user of our API is Foxtons, the estate agent, who added commuter maps to their property listings last week. It is suitable for any property, jobs or hotels site who hold location information (postcodes, or latitude and longitude) for their listings. The API can equally be used by those needing maps for internal purposes, such as city planners, public services and businesses with multiple branches.

We are really excited that the service has gone live, and we hope that it helps people and organisations in all sorts of ways. A big thank you to Channel 4 and Screen West Midlands, who have provided the commercial investment to enable the development of Mapumental technology and the new service.

If you have any feedback or comments, we’d love to hear them.

Sample map: commuting times to Wembley Stadium

Foxtons, whose website just won an award for Best Interface Design at the 2011 International Business Awards, were quick to see the value of travel time maps for house-hunters. Thousands of listings now display a simple, beautiful, map showing how long a commute to work or visit to friends will take on public transport – vital pieces of information to consider when looking for a new home.

The property sector is not the only area of business that stands to benefit from Mapumental’s ground-breaking mapping technology. Mapumental is already talking to major players in the travel industry and recruitment sectors.  Virtually any business that needs to show users how much time it takes to travel to or from a given spot will find these maps very valuable.

One of Mapumental’s core strengths is its  flexibility when it comes to volume – it can provide anything from a single map at a great price to tens of thousands at a significant volume discount.

The service utilises travel-time mapping technology developed by mySociety, drawing journey data from the NPTDR dataset. The same data also drives mySociety’s newest project FixMyTransport.com, which launched just last week, and covers all modes of public transport within GB.

For the maps service, our algorithm calculates journey times from any given point (postcode or latitude and longitude) to every other point in Great Britain. These journey times are displayed as a heatmap, on a background from OpenStreetMap.

Foxtons has made use of the new Mapumental API which enables clients to define the maps’ appearance precisely according to their company preferences. Parameters for choice include:

• maximum travel time
• number of time bands to show
• colour scheme
• the direction of travel (to or from the chosen location)
• target arrival or departure time
• other information (such as title and legend) that goes on the map.

The image is then automatically created and can be published on a website and/or included in printed materials. Website owners can publish the maps themselves, or we can create bespoke integration solutions for them..

To find out more about how Mapumental might work for you, please drop us a line.

Here are some samples of our maps:

Travel times from a residential development in Sevenoaks, departing at 7am

Travel times from St Pancras Reneissance Hotel, departing at 8am

Travel times to reach Cardiff University by 10am