NEWSLETTERS QTR. 2 - 2011

Just Down the Road for Visual Fusion: Drive Time and Routing Features

Peeking around the corner at Visual Fusion 5.5 (coming this fall), we can tell you about two great new features that will soon be available: Drive Time Service and Routing.

Drive Time

The Drive Time Service lets you visualize the geographic area within different driving times of a selected starting point. You could use it to:

• Visualize the area within an hour’s drive of your office, or within ten minutes’ drive of a given coffee shop.
• Determine territories for sales reps, marketing areas for retailers, or delivery times for supply chain applications.
• Locate competitors or potential customers within half an hour of your facility.

You can set as many drive-time zones as you need, and adjust them in the interactive selector. Here ten zones radiate out from Garden Grove in California. Drive Time colors can be configured in XML files.

Drive Time will let you set a starting point in multiple ways: type in an address, select a data item, or click a location on the map.

Set your drive-time ranges using the interactive selector.

Then, you can set drive-time ranges by clicking and dragging in the selector. For example, you could set up driving areas at evenly spaced intervals from your starting point: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, etc. Or you could define a single zone covering the area within 45 minutes of your start location. The Drive Time feature will let you tailor the settings to your needs.

The service is hosted in Microsoft's Azure, and uses the underlying posted speed limits of the road network to determine results. The drive-time polygons work with Visual Fusion’s spatial query feature; click on a polygon to find all of the data items within the area.

Driving Directions

The new Driving Directions feature will use Bing maps routing service to plot a route between points you select in VFX. Include as many points in the route as you like; it’s perfect for planning sales trips, delivery routes, house showings and making other travel plans.

We can’t wait to see how users will put Driving Directions and Drive Time to work in their applications. And these are just two of the features in the works for Visual Fusion 5.5. As always, we’re working to add value to each new release.