LightBox Announces The Completion And Availability Of Its Enhanced Nationwide Smart Location Fabric
Irvine, CA (December 20, 2021)—LightBox, a leading information and technology platform for the commercial real estate and location-based analytics industry, announced the release of a newly enhanced nationwide location fabric. “The problem that state and federal agencies are trying to solve is location data accuracy for broadband mapping. The new offering, SmartFabric, solves that problem,” said Bill Price, vice president of government solutions.
SmartFabric gets its name from a technologically innovative design that integrates each of LightBox’s core parcel, building footprint, address file, and geocoding with points of interest, cell phone location, and tax assessor details in a proprietary and flexible modeled fabric.
“SmartFabric gives our customers the flexibility to create their own definitions of Broadband Serviceable Locations, the ability to overlay other layers such as demographic information, a multitude of boundaries, speed data, ISP service areas, and customer data sets,” said Eric Frank, chief executive officer of LightBox. “Our state broadband customers are looking for solutions and our SmartFabric can be licensed by clients right now.”
“Accuracy in broadband mapping ensures that funding for broadband goes to help the unserved locations in a state,” said Price. “States that have their own maps and results can advocate for more funds by putting forth their own analysis of served versus unserved. States such as Georgia and Alabama that already have accurate location-level unserved data and maps are ahead of others that do not.”
The LightBox data acquisition team achieved tremendous gains in its coverage and depth of rural areas, tribal lands, and U.S. territories. “Notably, these are some of the areas where the digital divide in the country is at its widest,” said Zach Wade, vice president of data science. “It is important to realize that these advances accrue to the benefit of the entire LightBox client base and impact more than broadband mapping. Processing and linking large-scale spatial data sets has been a LightBox core competency for nearly two decades.”
The broadband serviceability modeling represents another large step forward for the broadband industry. LightBox has now combined its prior use of approximately two billion Wi-Fi access points with billions of real-time cell phone GPS observations. The result provides even greater precision to tie building footprints to ISP data, particularly in tribal regions, and improved classification of building types as commercial or residential where municipal assessor coverage does not exist.
LightBox SmartFabric is the next generation of LightBox’s SmartParcels, a nationwide parcel-based location fabric that connects parcel boundaries with more than 300 property and tax attributes, spatially enabling the property data. The Nationwide SmartParcels is currently licensed by many federal and state agencies. Broadband mapping projects in Georgia and Alabama leverage LightBox SmartParcel location fabric. The National Geospatial Intelligence
Agency uses the same location fabric in its Homeland Infrastructure’s Foundation Level geospatial database to support domestic operational, situational, and strategic awareness of the nation’s infrastructure to support crisis and consequence management, preparedness planning, and critical infrastructure analysis and protection.
LightBox partners with FEMA to deliver location fabric cut in real-time to natural disaster boundaries to help with the rescue, damage assessment, and recovery planning caused by hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters. Likewise, many of the world’s leading technology, telecommunications, and real estate companies use the same nationwide location fabric in their consumer-facing mapping applications, reliable search and direction, and infrastructure build-out, demonstrating the accuracy, currency, and completeness of the LightBox product. Current customers of LightBox nationwide SmartParcels location fabric include Google, Microsoft, Here, TomTom, Verizon, AT&T, Charter Communications, Zillow, and Redfin, among many others.
“This new product reflects the expertise of the LightBox team arising from years of experience building, maintaining, enhancing, and licensing nationwide location fabric to over 1,200 customers since 2008,” said Frank. “After all, one doesn’t become a gourmet chef by reading a cookbook. Years of experimenting with the right ingredients, the right proportions, and the right equipment are the elements that distinguish a meal served in a Michelin-starred restaurant from a home-cooked one.”
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About LightBox
LightBox is the world’s leading commercial real estate information and technology platform. Through operational excellence and a passion for innovation, LightBox facilitates transparency, efficiency, insight, and prediction for real estate investment and location analytics. LightBox customers include commercial and government agencies requiring definitive real estate data and powerful workflow solutions, including brokers, developers, investors, lenders, insurers, technology providers, environmental consultants, and valuation professionals. LightBox is backed by Silver Lake and Battery Ventures.
Contact: For more information about LightBox services, contact Caroline Stoll at cstoll@lightboxre.com or Karen Ashley at kashley@lightboxre.com.
