Internet Locator Unveiled

Touch-Map® Systems of Jupiter Florida announced the availability of Touch-Map® OnLine an Internet locator/mapping program. Touch-Map® is unlike any other Internet locator product with the ability of being able to click across the country to locate a company's stores. With easy to read maps, very fast server response time and an on screen" search engine Touch-Map® OnLine changes the look and feel of Internet locating.

(PRWEB) April 6, 2005 -- Jerry Trowbridge a partner at Touch-Map® Systems said We took our well known proprietary geo-search software and ported it to the heart of this new product. After twenty two years of locator experience we already understood where the gotcha's were. We believe that Touch-Map® OnLine feels to the end user like the mature, robust, evolved product that it is."

Another unique feature of Touch-Map® OnLine is the local page that the end user can click on to get even more local information such as sales, directions or just to meet the staff. This feature is called PersonalityPage for service based companies such as beauty salons, tax preparation, etc. and StoreVisit for retailers.

More information about Touch-Map® and a working demo of Touch-Map® OnLine is available at www.TouchMap.com.

Background:
Touch-Map® Systems is a division of Access Radio the developers of Touch-Vote the first touch-tone based polling system developed for broadcast outlets. Touch-Map® came into being after the company developed the first telephone locator system" nearly 23 years ago.

Technical:
The roll out of TMO is supported by a dedicated full T1 on the Qwest backbone. TMO runs on a Windows server, with a dedicated hot backup, in our edge network. The search engine is implemented in C++ and inline assembly as a com server object, for fast search responses.

The entry and results pages are a mix of HTML, Java, ASP and VBscript, and make use of the superior compression and lossless technology of PNG files. These files are optimized to 8 bit for lightning-fast delivery over broadband, and reasonable delivery over older dial-ups. Because so much attention has been given to making the included graphics as small as possible through palette control and new compression technologies, when bandwidth increases are required, our first priority will be to multi-home our servers on a completely-distinct backbone.

Much of this support technology has been used in-house at Touch-Map® systems for production and cross-checking of data delivered over our voice locator systems since 1985. We were at the Alpha stage and in heavy development on the web product at the time we were struck by Hurricane Frances, in September, 2004.

The biggest handicap in bringing TMO to fruition was the proliferation of older browsers that did not support the newer browser technologies or compression algorithms. Today, however, the market share of older browsers has declined to single-digits, most of them IE4 or lower that are daily being upgraded or replaced by newer alternatives such as Firefox. The product has been fully tested and performs correctly on Mozilla (FireFox) (1.0 or later), NetScape Navigator (3.0 or later), Opera (2.1 or later) Safari (1.0 or later) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (4.0 or later). Microsoft has announced their intention to release IE 7.0 as a standalone in the next few months.

TMO differs from mapping programs in a number of ways. Every other locator we've seen, comes at locating from a mapping perspective, and adds overlays to support searching and displaying nearby target locations. We approach the problem from the opposite end. The user describes their location through any of the common methods, (city-state, area code-prefix, zip code, or landmarks), and we take them to what our advanced geosearch engine indicates is the closest location

Contact: Jerry Trowbridge,Partner, 1-877-TOUCHMAP ext 3#, Trowbridge@TouchMap.com

Touch-Map® Systems
1001 Jupiter Park Drive
Jupiter, Florida 33458
1-877-TOUCHMAP
FAX 561 -741-4323
PressRoom@TouchMap.com
www.TouchMap.com

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