We launched CrimeHouston.com during the Spring of 2006.  CrimeHouston provides our customers quick and easy mapping access to crime incident data for the City of Houston.  This data is "public information" and provided by the Houston Police Department. 

How we got started:
In 2005 a family member was starting school in the Houston Medical District and looking for an apartment.  Not being familiar with the area we had immediate questions about the safety of different housing locations.  By chance we located the HPD public crime data. This data was in database format and provided a monthly list of crime incidents.  It was very difficult to use this tabular data to infer the safety of a particular area. If only this data could be placed on a map?  Well, that question led to many hours of collecting data, learning about mapping, address geocoding, etc. But finally after 6 months of initial work CrimeHouston.com was born, providing a map based view of crime incidents for the Houston City Limits.