Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, April 1, 2007:
HelpSpot Customer Map
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
I recently stumbled across this really cool PHP class for working with the Google map API. Being bored on Saturday I figured it would be fun to map all of the HelpSpot customers. While I’ve looked at this data before, I’ve never plotted it on a map. It turns out to be very interesting. It’s cool to see the little dots all over, but it’s even more interesting to see how many customers are near each other and how just about every major city in the US has at least one HelpSpot customer.
One disappointing note is that I’d say only about half the customers are actually on the map. While most of the addresses work fine in Google maps directly, they don’t seem to work using the Google web service for finding the coordinates. It misses some US and many international addresses, which I guess is to be expected. Most disappointing though is that it fails to return any coordinates for customers in the UK. Since 15-20% of HelpSpot sales are there that takes a good chunk of the customers out right off the top. It also leaves Europe looking slimmer than it should.
You’ll also see that no Asian countries have icons at all, which is also incorrect, but I’m not surprised that the API couldn’t plot the addresses. Australia is under represented and on and on. Never the less, it’s cool and actually a bit informative.
The World:
The USA:
San Fransisco (we’ve got the bay surrounded):
Seattle:
Paris (2 customers in walking distance):
Discussion
Very nice, Ian.
With so many customers so close together, there's no excuse for not organizing a HelpSpot User Conference in at least one area. 
Created by Christopher Hawkins on 04.01.2007 5:48 pm
Very cool idea. I might try doing the same myself.
The actual reason I left the comment: hadn't come around here in a long time, and I find the light blue text way too dark and hard to read. Please make it lighter! Apart from that, the blog looks great.
Created by Jon on 04.01.2007 5:50 pm
I'd love to do that someday! I think it's a bit early, but I can definitely see it happening. Perhaps an informal one, just go to a city where we're big and buy everyone dinner or something.
Created by Ian on 04.01.2007 5:51 pm
Yeah, actually I'm going to nuke this design. I'm going to style this blog similar to the new UserScape site which I'm implementing now.
Created by Ian on 04.01.2007 6:41 pm
Ian, I just couldn't resist and geolocated my customers too and blogged about it. I hope you won't hate me too much for plagiarizing you so quickly
Created by Jon on 04.01.2007 8:29 pm
No problem 
I hope you don't mind that I jumped on your idea asap and cleaned up my blog! I stole (with permission) the Jakob Neilson layout. Back to basics (again). We'll see how long it lasts.
Created by Ian on 04.01.2007 8:35 pm
Good, much more readable now. The previous one was nice, the text just wasn't readable.
BTW, in my version, I cleaned up a few addresses by hand to get them geolocated - I just wanted to show some of the weirdest places where I have customers. With the UK, even if I cleaned up the addresses (just a zip code and "United Kingdom" works in maps.google.com), they weren't recognized by the API. In any case, this is no heavy duty requirement area and it fits the bill perfectly!
Created by Jon on 04.01.2007 8:42 pm
Nice. But I'd take the underground in Paris instead of walking that distance.
Created by Wouter Dhondt on 04.02.2007 5:32 am
Cool. I can tell which sale is mine since I live in a region that didn't get a lot of sales. Please don't stop selling to me just because my region isn't so great 
Created by Ben on 04.02.2007 6:24 am
Great idea Ian! We had to do the same thing and published a customer map on our blog. I hope you don't mind.
Created by Dennis Gurock on 04.02.2007 5:20 pm
No problem at all Dennis. I would like to know though how you got the UK to map.
Created by Ian on 04.03.2007 10:36 am
We added some of our UK customers manually (by using addMarkerByCoords); we don't have a fix for the UK address issue. But because we did this manually and it took quite a bit of time, we gave up after half of our UK customers...
Created by Dennis on 04.03.2007 6:07 pm