The other day, we decided to do a little fun experiment to see where our customers who use OnTime are on a world map.  We decided to do this using Google's Map API service and loading up our customer database of over 5,000 companies to see how it all looks.  The first thing we found is that you can't really load 5,000 pins into a world Google Map.  It just doesn't work.  It slows down to a crawl and actually getting the geocodes for 5,000 different pins from the server can be quite time consuming.  Both IE and FirFox tend to choke when you go above 800 or so pins (addresses).

So we decided to filter the qualification of customers who get a pin to show about the largest 600 or so customers who have adopted OnTime worldwide.  Here's what it looks like for the US:

The outcome was very cool, so we decided to make the map of OnTime customers available on our web site.

We learned a lot of interesting information from this little experiment, including:

• Wholly cow!  We have a lot of customers.  :-)  Thanks!!!
• Google Geocoding was not available for a lot of countries, including, surprisingly, the UK!  Even if we gave Google just the country name and nothing else, it still couldn't give us a long/lat that worked for the UK addresses.
• Google tends to give bogus geocodes (long/lat) in rare cases if it doesn't know where an address is (and it doesn't know that it doesn't know), which is why sometimes (as in the image above) there are pins in the middle of the ocean (look to the left of Seattle)
• We implemented our algorithm for geocoding as follows:
• First, try to geocode the full address
• If Google tells us it doesn't know the address, we would then resort to city & country
• Finally, if it didn't know that, we would only give it country
• However, when pins are on top of each other (as they would be if there were 10 customers in the same city, such as Sydney, Australia), you only see 1 pin.  That's a bummer because you don't get the full effect of the number of customers in those regions, but not a big deal in the overall scheme of things.
• Google Map API is very cool!

One of the other interesting things we found, as you might be able to notice from the image above is that there are probably good and bad states to live in if you happen to be in the software development business.  So we thought it would be fun to do a top 10 best and top 10 worst states for companies that ship software OnTime ;-)

Top 10 Best States for Companies that Ship Software OnTime:

1. California
2. Texas
3. Virginia
4. Florida
5. Massachusetts
6. Colorado
7. New York
8. Maryland
9. Arizona (home of Axosoft)
10. Washington (although it's safe to say MS had nothing to do with Washington being in top 10)

Top 10 Worst States for Companies that [try to] Ship Software OnTime:

1. Alaska
2. Kentucky
3. North Dakota
4. New Mexico
5. South Dakota
6. Vermont
7. Wyoming
8. Mississippi
9. Rhode Island
10. Delaware

It's fun to zoom into your region to see if there are any companies near your home town that use OnTime.  Let us know what you think of the map.