Pitney Bowes Offers Silverlight-based FireLocator

Arthur R. Berrill, Vice President of Advanced Concepts and Technology at Pitney Bowes let us know about the new FireLocator app, currently in beta, thinking it may be of use to readers and those dealing with the current California fires. The app was created by Pitney Bowes Advanced Concepts and Technologies (AC&T) in collaboration with Pitney Bowes MapInfo. It provides geocoding to find fires (current and historical) around specific addresses. Data comes from the usual “fire” places including:

- NASA Modis Data
- Incident Information System (InciWeb)
- GeoMac Multi Agency Coordination (GeoMac) 
- California Wild-Fire Zones

And there’s other fire-related content including:
- pictures from Flikr
- news from San Bernardino Sun

Underneath you’ll find Virtual Earth, Silverlight, PB MapInfo’s Envinsa and BP MapInfo’s geocoding. This is the first I’ve heard of AC&T.

You can access a video (movie reel icon) about the app and the “about” information (“i” icon) on the right of the tool/search bar. I didn’t see them on my first visit. The main interactive feature (at this point) seems to be the ability to save specific locations which can be visited in the future.