15 March 1999 – Carson City: Manifold Net has commenced shipments of Manifold System Release 4.50, a milestone in GIS technology. The package delivers hundreds of advanced, professional GIS features for a sub-$150 price while at the same time improving ease of use. The new version includes ViewBots, a new GIS technology unavailable in any other system, the Manifold SpreadSheet and complete Active X / Visual Basic scripting examples that interface with Microsoft prodcuts such as Excel, Access, Outlook, and MapPoint.

"4.50 is the first GIS software package that brings PC market economies of scale and values to GIS. In all other software markets, people have long been able to get software values commensurate with PC hardware values, but GIS has been stuck in a living-fossil era where people had to pay minicomputer and mainframe prices to get professional functionality on the desktop. Manifold 4.50 changes all that by delivering a more modern, more powerful system for thousands of dollars less than the competition," said Ilya Guschin, President.

Manifold is a sophisticated GIS package for professional use. It allows users to work with an unlimited number of maps in an unlimited number of layers that may contain an unlimited number of objects in an unlimited number of formats. Unlike "lobotomized" viewers or entry level GIS packages, Manifold includes networking, geometric, statistical, database, spatial, and topological capabilities normally found in GIS packages that cost thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars. The package includes numerous converters as well as full development capability using Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting or Javascript plus Spatial SQL, all at no additional cost.

"GIS has been a conservative market dominated by the software equivalent of $500 hammers and $2000 toilet seats," said Dimitri Rotow, contract product manager. "But with the emergence of PC’s that provide 450 Mhz processors and 10 gigabyte disks for less than a thousand dollars, people are asking themselves ‘why am I paying thousands of dollars for obsolete minicomputer crud that takes a year to learn?’ There’s a huge demand among GIS professionals for sensibly-priced, modern, no-compromise software that uses standard Microsoft languages and methods."

Advanced Manifold analytic features such as ViewBots™ , the Manifold Geographic SpreadSheet, Table View Calculator, the Publish for MapPoint 2000 wizard, Network Console and many others are not available in any other GIS at any price. Only Manifold has a point-and-click Spatial SQL toolbar that’s easy for any user.

ViewBots are small toolbars that float in Map View and continuously report a computational result on whatever they are told to watch. A user might pop open a ‘bot that watches everything visible in the current map view and reports the sum of a field called "Insured Amount" for all the customer records in view. As the user pans and zooms the map display, the ViewBot will always report the total Insured Amount at risk for what’s in view. This makes it really easy to interactively "browse" the map in whatever data context is important.

Formatting and Editing - Manifold provides a huge array of formatting features that allow control of all formatting characteristics (foreground and background color, style, size, icon, labels, text fonts and characteristics, direction arrows, etc) under thematic control of data attributes. Each object in the map can be formatted independently, automatically. A rich set of editing capabilites, including global "morph" capabilities, allow editing of existing maps or the creation of new ones

Spatial Capabilities - Manifold allows free-form selection by mouse, by text table view, by solvers, by Spatial SQL and by many other paths, all of which can use embedded Spatial capabilities. Spatial capabilities include by proximity, by relationships such as "within" or "adjacent" or "touching", by characteristics such as length or area, and over 100 others. Spatial operations include point-in-polygon spatial overlays, automatic merges of data to inherited objects (such as centroids computed on areas/polygons), buffer zones and multiple buffer zones, automatic contouring and multiple contours, Voronoi tilings, spatial correlation statistics, reachable zones, Akima interpolation to transform the "shape" of point data, and many more.

Topology - Topology savvy is embedded throughout the system: Manifold will automatically reckon topological relationships to perform tasks such as the creation of areas/polygons from borders throughout maps, combining areas to form new areas, finding intersections, finding non-intersections, subtracting areas/polygons from others to create new figures and numerous others. Manifold’s Morph functions can move, rotate, flip, scale, distort, grid distort, smooth, simplify, orthogonalize and repair data by attaching links to nodes, nodes to links, links to links, remove duplicates and more.

Networking - Manifold has more networking features and better, more flexible features than any other package, at any price. Over 150 networking functions perform all aspects of routing and network analysis, including multiple-agent routing through links and nodes, network structure analysis such as critical links and nodes and cutsets, to spanning trees, Steiner trees, Euler and Hamilton paths, emergency and regular center detection, maximum flow, minimax path, network planarity, clusters, blocks, metric properties, eccentricity, decompositions and much, much more. Unlike the usual, remarkably-stupid $10,000 GIS packages most often sold for networking, Manifold can utilize an Active X Formula within any network solver box or weight. This means the system can "on the fly" compute sophisticated multi-variable routing criteria incorporating costs, lengths, desirability of various paths, relative importance of various sites or paths and more.

Geometry and Statistics - Manifold includes a huge array of point-and-click geometric functions and statistics functions, including numerous statistics functions. Statistics solvers and functions are interwoven with SQL, the spreadsheet and scripting so that statistics functions are always available in any context.

Selection - Only Manifold provides a free-form selection methodology that combines mouse selection, SQL selection, Table View text selection, and selection with solvers. New selections may be combined with previous ones using replace, add, subtract, invert, and intersection combinations. The result is a system that "daisy-chains" the output of one selection method into the next like stringing pearls on a necklace to achieve exactly the desired effect.

Scripting and Formulas – Every copy of Manifold includes a complete scripting system using Microsoft Active X and Visual Basic scripting or Javascript. Over 400 functions are available, including embedded Spatial SQL, plus any external or third party object. Most functions can also be used within geographic SpreadSheet formulas as well. A detailed tutorial shows how to create new scripts from elementary steps to using Manifold to control external applications. Examples include sending email through Outlook, writing tables to Excel, spell-checking place names with MapPoint and many more.

Database Command and Control - Manifold includes a powerful Spatial SQL database engine. Database functions seamlessly integrate with map view, geometry, topology, selection and other functions to allow free-form control of data by visual operations. A Manifold exclusive, the database engine includes the Manifold version of Manifold Commander, a database product that’s won "Five Star Editor’s Pick" from ZD Net. Commander allows free-form manipulation of databases using over 100 verbs. Highlight all records or just a selection, and then multiply each value in a given field by 3.36, convert integers to text, and much more. Manifold Net is the only GIS company with such strong database capabilities that we win awards in database markets as well!

Integrated GPS - With the cost of quality GPS recievers plummeting under $100, it is simply a crime not to support GPS within every GIS package. Manifold includes a real-time GPS Console that automatically tracks and aquires data from GPS units, including automatic creation of map objects, even while the user can continue working on other Manifold tasks. This provides instant moving map capability as well as sophisticated data acquisition.

Publish for MapPoint – Microsoft’s new MapPoint 2000 product (an Office 2000 application) will provide millions of Office users a core map visualization capability. While it is nearly empty of analytic capability, there’s no doubt it will be the most widely distributed map and map data viewer of all time. Manifold’s Publish For MapPoint 2000 Wizard automates the process of publishing data sets that are pre-keyed for use with MapPoint geographic entities. GIS professionals can now use the infinite analytic power of Manifold to author data sets for use in MapPoint. No other GIS application has this capability.

Computer Networking - Manifold’s network autodiscovery and network console "discovers" computer networks to show them as maps, and to provide a real-time status check on whether web servers or other nodes are up or down. Manifold can map local file systems, network file systems, web sites, and networks of computers using SNMP, DNS, or TCP/IP. Because Manifold has such strong visualization and data analytics, it is not limited to merely geographic contexts: it can draw and display abstract maps or CAD diagrams as well as geographic maps.

Free Data and Maps – Traditional GIS systems use proprietary formats so they can sell users maps and data. Manifold is different: it includes free converters for all of the popular government and GIS formats, including SDTS, VPF, DLG, TIGER/Line 1995, TIGER/Line 1997, DEM, GTOPO30 DEM, DXF, SHP, MID/MIF and E00. Manifold reads Microsoft mdb database format (Manifold’s native data format), as well as Oracle, SQL Server, Excel, Paradox, dBase, FoxPro, Access, or virtually any text format database. Manifold installs ODBC drivers for all of these systems.

The Manifold CD includes 630 megabytes of free US and world maps and data, including thousands of fields of demographic data for the US. Manifold includes the 1997 Statistical Abstract of the United States, the City and County Databook, and USA Counties 1996 data sets from the US Bureau of the Census. The Census Bureau sells these data sets for hundreds of dollars. In addition, the Manifold FTP servers provide over 30 Gigabytes of high resolution maps and data for free download by Manifold customers.

The above are a small fraction of Manifold’s capabilities. The User Manual runs 900 pages and features 1200 illustrations. Visit the web site at www.manifold.net for extensive details.