Dr. Andrew Schiller is a geographer and the CEO of Woonsocket-based NeighborhoodScout / Location Inc. Andrew will be presenting Neighborhood Scout, including a sneak peak at v2, at this month's Providence Geeks Dinner the evening of Wednesday February the 20th. All are welcome. RSVP and details here.

"The reporter from Forbes is on the phone again for you" says Kristin, as I take my focus off of a bug report in Fogbugz. "Ok, tell him I'll be right with him." During the call, I offer to provide the reporter access to the site so he can research his own story, which he gladly takes me up on. While I'm on the phone a prospective investor calls, and I receive three emails. One of the emails is from our dbase person with questions about which data to plug in where for showing a person's chance of becoming a victim of violent crime at the neighborhood level. Another question is about presentation of our text descriptions for every city, town, and neighborhood in America. But by the end of the day, new functions are working, new pages are up. I go from being tired to being excited. I get home from a 12 hour day, but I can't wait to fire up the computer and show my wife the new features that just came on line on our development servers an hour earlier. Even my seven year old daughter says "Wow. That looks cool.""

Such is the hectic, exciting days we are having now as we prepare to re-launch our website, NeighborhoodScout.com, with about 250,000 pages of unique content covering every city, town, village, state, neighborhood, and yes, even each public school building in the U.S. New maps, new text, new data, a new design, new search capabilities, all to execute on our plan to be found, to be understood, and to be valued. Our mantra.

Forbes.com has done four stories using our data this year. The New York Times did one, and so did U.S. News. Front page of AOL? Yes. Yahoo? Yup. But we're still small, for now. We can all taste the success of the new site, I can see it on the staff's faces, I can hear it in their voices. Planning for two years, executing for one, targeting a launch within weeks. Sometimes I can't sleep. My clarity of vision for what this will be is becoming real.

Sometimes I feel bi-polar because a day will have such lofty highs and then some lows, but the site keeps growing.

So we drink more coffee, we spend more time coordinating with the team – both on staff and contractors, we get to work by 7, and leave by 7 (or 8), and we march towards the launch of the biggest, most in-depth smart search engine for neighborhoods ever built. Thank you Rhode Island for being our home! I can't wait to celebrate together with you. We need a launch party! Any ideas on having one, as we've never had one before? I would love to hear your thoughts.