ViEmu around the world
It’s not my fault. Ian Landsman started, and I just couldn’t resist. His blog post describes a cool php component to use the Google Maps API and show a list of addresses in a map. He used it to show where Helpspot (his popular help desk software application) customers are. And I had to do it. A couple of hours and quite a few manual fixes later, here are some cool takes (not all of the addresses resolved, and the ones who payed through Paypal, including as a few Chinese customers, aren’t shown here either):
All around the world!
The U.S. and Canada (most of my customers)
Europe (UK addresses don’t show up)
Japan and Korea – there are a lot of customers in Japan, but I had to reduce it to just cities
The bay area.
Seattle
Southern California
And an overview of the East Coast.
Even in the land down under!
And here are a few exotic places – now how cool is that?
I’m planning to set up a ViEmu-specific blog in the next few days, and I was meaning to post this there – but I just couldn’t resist! I may even add some of this to the ViEmu home page, it makes for a good, reassuring visual explanation that ViEmu is used by lots of people around the world!
April 2nd, 2007 at 2:42 am
Nice job with the manual fixes. I was too lazy!
April 2nd, 2007 at 2:42 am
I see you also had the UK issue 🙁
April 2nd, 2007 at 2:47 am
I didn’t fix them all, but I fixed a few. I didn’t want to lose customers in the most exotic places!
Also, I fixed UK addresses until they worked in the maps.google.com interface (zip code + “United Kingdom”), but they didn’t work through the API 🙁
It was a pity with Japan, because there are quite a few customers over there, but the only way to make them show up was to just leave the city. I actually even have a few provisions in ViEmu for interaction with Japanese input modes.
vi input with Japanese text – *that* must be really hard! – 🙂
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:09 pm
[…] Following Ian’s and Jon’s examples, we created a customer map for our logging tool SmartInspect. The images below show the cities and areas where our customers are located. I think it’s great to have SmartInspect users from so many different places around the world! […]
April 8th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Impressive ! If only I can get some spot when my business will really start. Contratulation.
April 8th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Thanks! What do you mean get some spot?
Regards,
Jon
April 8th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Humm… I suppose I suffer from the syndrome… “Only my grand-mother will buy my stuff”…
But no. I’m motivated.
Bye.
April 8th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
I think that if it solves a pain other people have, it will sell. You have to work a lot to get there, but you will. That “pain” is the most important part.
Good luck and stay motivated!
April 9th, 2007 at 9:57 am
I found me. 🙂
April 9th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Cool 🙂
August 29th, 2007 at 4:55 am
I didn’t find myself, I’m from Beijing/China….
August 29th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Hi Jia,
Thanks for the pointer. Actually, the list above is by no means complete… a salient problem of Google’s geocoder is that it wouldn’t decode addresses in some countries, notably, the UK, China, and others. I even mentioned the lack of ‘pins’ in China on the opening paragraph…
I can’t remember the exact figure, but about only half of all addresses resolved (and I also have customers for whom I don’t have an address). That, plus the fact that many pins are concentrated at the same coordinates, made the map above a “representative sample”.
I love all my customers equally, but Google maps doesn’t love resolving addresses from all countries equally 🙂
August 29th, 2007 at 9:49 am
He he, thanks for reply, it is ok, hope more and more Chinese developers to use Viemu. 🙂
August 29th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
A few Chinese developers do (but not very many!). ViEmu has provisions for integration with Chinese/Japanese/Korean IMEs though! This is indeed a global market 🙂
Now using vi with kanjis/hanzis – that must be amazing!
August 31st, 2007 at 7:35 am
Yeah, that’s will be very cool and all Asia developers will like it.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:58 pm
There are a quite a few Asian developers using it, so indeed I’ve implemented a few features for them. The good thing with software that has been out for a while is that many things are taken care of!
Thanks,
– Jon
December 13th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
[…] The reasoning was that ViEmu has received a lot of praise and love over the last years, and I wanted this to be shown on the main page. Some people might feel they are the only ones interested in such a product, and the truth is that they are members of a now pretty large brotherhood. Having a small pic and a link to the worldwide ViEmu customer map already helps in that. I feel that the new viemu.com home page reflects the ViEmu customer base and activity better than the previous, “drier” one. […]
May 13th, 2008 at 10:32 am
You can also add there Nairobi, Kenya!
May 14th, 2008 at 2:10 am
Thanks Conrad, the maps are over a year old now and not updated, so there are actually quite a few new places missing there!
March 13th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Add the Bahamas to that list.
March 28th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Kyle, glad to know it’s used over there too. I really have to update the map, it’s now pretty old and incomplete — almost two years since I posted it!!
September 10th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
[…] finally found the time to put it together. I’ve digged up the php code I used for the ViEmu around the world map over two years ago, entered the Codekana customers data, and got a nice map courtesy of Google […]