The City of Asheville, North Carolina, won the Excellence in Economic Development award in the New Media Initiative category from the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) for its mapAsheville Priority Places, an interactive economic development mapping tool created to strengthen investment within the region. The City of Asheville's Office of Economic Development selected Avencia Incorporated to design Priority Places to help business owners, citizens, or government agencies weigh multiple geographic factors and generate Web-based heat maps that highlight optimal locations for their activities.

GeoDecisions has acquired GeoPlan software from Regional Planning Technologies Inc. (RPT), which will enable it to improve and expand its level of support for all GeoPlan software users, according to the company.

U.S. advertising firm the Martin Agency is using Pitney Bowes MapInfo products to track the lifestyle and purchasing behaviors of its clients' customers and uses that data to enhance its advertising campaigns, according to the companies.

SRC LLC has upgraded its Alteryx and Alteryx Enterprise business analytics software, unifying map, table, and report browsing in a single tool that offers interactive views and access to spatial and nonspatial data streams within Alteryx data flow modules, according to the company.

The U.S. Patent Office has allowed all of Boundary Solutions Inc.'s claims in its pending application dealing with the display of parcel boundaries, effectively broadening the terms of its U.S. patent no. 7,092,957.

GfK GeoMarketing has released the GfK Europe Map Edition 2008/2009, which contains thousands of additions and updates, including several thousand administrative boundary changes across Europe, as well as 1,000 digital maps for 42 countries, according to the company.

Competitive Analytics Professionals LLC (CAP) has released ReCAP Retail version 8.2, expanding it by some 110,000 individual locations; it reportedly now covers more than 930,000 U.S. and Canadian locations of more than 5,500 major retail chains in 70 retail categories.

Location-based content provider Urban Mapping Inc. has announced that it is powering the neighborhood functionality in Zoocasa, a free Canadian real estate search engine designed to let consumers research Canadian homes on the market.

Urban Mapping Inc. and infoUSA have inked an agreement under which infoUSA customers can link business listings with contextually-relevant neighborhood information from Urban Mapping's database of more than 60,000 U.S. neighborhoods represented in more than 2,700 cities and towns, according to the companies.