Welcome to Envention

We share this site hoping that motivated, smart individuals (like you of course) will comment on the things you like and don’t like.

We change the stuff on this site often – sometimes many times a day. If you'd like it to stop changing for a bit (for a demo perhaps), please let us know and we'll stop playing with the knobs. But we can only leave the remote alone for a little while ...

Envention.biz is an extensive prototype. It might fall over or do something odd. We hope it won’t but if it does we’d be very grateful if you’d let us know what happened. So we can blame somebody.

You don’t need to install anything to run this. We’d love it if you rushed out and bought gobs of our stuff once you've tried it out, but you don’t need anything from us to run it. Just remember that some of us have kids to feed.

Supporting this site from behind the scenes are full production versions of Pitney Bowes Business Insight® products including Envinsa® (you can read about it here), SpatialWare® (here), the TargetPro® server (here), Predictive Analytics models (here) and Pitney Bowes Business Insight Data (here). These won’t fall over.

Our good friends at Pictometry® have been great partners in the creation of this site. You’ll recognize their contribution when you see it. We encourage you to visit them here.

Credit must go to the amazing ZK team here. Our tricked user interface is mostly done using their API. We like their stuff. The ZK team wrote: “Envention is a fabulous, versatile Web maps application created by Pitney Bowes Business Insight. This site is packed with many cool stuff. It is ZK's honor to be chosen to help build such an all-inclusive site.”

This prototype includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com/.

If you’re still reading this then you’re just the kind of person we’d love to have try out this site. We need feedback. Please leave comments, suggestions, offers of free food or creative uses you’ve found for envention.biz on the feedback page. That’s what this is all about. We want to know how we can be more useful to you.

Here are ten things we think you might like.

1. Turn on the Address Finder and roam around the map. Watch the space above the map and be impressed. We were and we made it!

2. Put your home address in and check the demographics of your neighborhood, or your friend’s neighborhood or that nice person you sit beside on the train that you've always wanted to be friends with ...

3. Run a sales forecasting model and look at predicted sales in various places. Compare those with the demographics of those areas.

4. Turn on live drive time and drive distance and examine the reports in those areas. Move the cursor around and see the polygons and reports regenerated on the fly.

5. Under the Traffic tab turn on the traffic feed. The map will show you real time where there are accidents. Go to a restaurant instead.

6. And for a limited time only – turn on Google with the Aerial checkbox. Try the transparency adjustment.

7. Try out the Zoom button.

8. Be sure to try the Camera option. We think Spock would have liked that one. Put the thing that looks like a molecule on something you’d like a good look at then click where you’d like to view from. You can drag the molecule around the map or you can click on any lists you have such as search lists and the molecule will show you those locations. Of course we always look for pizza but you can even look for gyms.

9. Want to know about the Weather?  Of course you do.  You don’t even have to look out the window any more. And, you'll have something to talk about with your Canadian friends, eh.

10. Right-click on things.  Really.  Even though this application is browser-based, many of the controls (e.g., the Camera molecule, the Analysis crosshairs, the map itself) have various right-click actions associated with them.  See if you can find them all.

Thank-you for reading this and please enjoy our site. And please leave us comments.