WeoGeo in The Tampa Tribune

Reprinted from The Tampa Tribune.

Trading The World At A Price

By RICHARD MULLINS, The Tampa Tribune
Published: February 8, 2008
Updated: 02/07/2008 10:12 pm

TAMPA – From a nondescript corporate office complex off Fowler Avenue, Paul Bissett can dial up spectacular aerial views of just about anywhere on the planet on his computer screen. Beaches in Port St. Joe. Rural colleges in Ohio. Maps of utility lines in the West.

And the images are all for sale through a form of eBay marketplace for aerial maps.

That’s because Bissett and a few other mapping experts may have found a way to create a marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and trade digital maps of almost any sort. Oil companies with detailed layouts of coastline can sell their maps to wetlands experts studying bird migration. City engineers can sell maps of water lines to developers. And pretty much anyone with a credit card can buy maps of extraordinary detail around the globe.

“These are the kinds of maps that are very expensive to make, and then end up sitting in someone’s computer forever – when they might be just the thing someone else needs, and is willing to pay for,” said Paul Bissett, chief executive of the startup company WeoGeo.

To entice companies to post the maps they have in storage, and quickly, WeoGeo devised a formula that compounds the revenue they could make well beyond a single sale to a buyer.

It works this way:

A company with maps stored in their computers (like a water utility in Tampa) uploads its maps to the WeoGeo system, typically for a fee of a few dollars. The maps might include the aerial images of the city, plus layers of detail like elevation, property lines and location of water pipes.

Anyone interested in finding water lines in Tampa could go on the WeoGeo Web site and search “Tampa” and see lists of maps for sale. Buyers can dial in just what size map they need, and add or subtract the utility or property lines as needed – with prices varying with each choice.

Buyers can then acquire the maps for their own purposes. That could generate $50 for the company that posted the map at first. Then if that second company modifies the map (with things like location of cell phone towers or gas stations) it can repost it for sale again.

If a third company purchases the modified map, the first and second company receive a payout, all managed by a kind of genealogy system run by WeoGeo. So, there’s an incentive for companies to post maps quickly so their maps become the foundation material used by others in the WeoGeo marketplace. WeoGeo takes a few dollars for each posting and sale, depending on the map’s size.

Still in a private testing phase, WeoGeo hasn’t reposted any modified maps yet.

Amazon Helps Relieve Data Storage Issues

Last week, WeoGeo announced that a major mapping company, Aerials Express of Tempe, Ariz., signed up for the system and uploaded 16,000 digital aerial photos of 120 key urban areas in the United States, which brings up the issue of data storage.

Some maps can total thousands of megabytes in size, so if that system seems like a recipe for a massive data traffic jam, it could be. Except WeoGeo signed up for a pilot project with online bookseller Amazon.

With the system, Amazon leases space on its several computer clusters across the nation to WeoGeo through a division called Amazon Web Services. When members of the WeoGeo marketplace upload or buy maps, they go directly to and from Amazon’s computers – bypassing WeoGeo’s computers in Tampa.

Amazon charges for the memory used by the WeoGeo system as needed – with costs covered by the fees companies pay for posting a map. That makes WeoGeo merely the administrator of the market, not the storage site for the goods bought and sold.

WeoGeo May Have Struck At Key Time

WeoGeo was founded last year, but has roots tracing back much further.

The colleagues who started WeoGeo worked for years at the Florida Environmental Research Institute, an independent nonprofit research group that conducts mapping research for several government and private groups.

Doing their work, they frequently needed maps they knew existed, but could find no easy way to access or buy them. That problem proved the seed of WeoGeo.

WeoGeo may have struck at a key time for the mapping world, as mapping companies are fast becoming hot properties for takeovers, sparked by successes of online mappers such as Mapquest and Google’s Local page. Add to this the rapid growth of personal GPS devices from companies like Garmin, TomTom and Magellan.

In October, cell phone giant Nokia Corp. cut a deal to buy the Chicago-based mapping company Navteq for $8.1 billion, with plans to use Navteq maps to target advertisements to a cell phone user’s location.

Then a month later Dutch-owned GPS maker TomTom beat out rival Garmin Ltd. in a bidding war for mapping company Tele Atlas, with a $4.2 billion offer.

The personal GPS device industry alone (not to mention mapping companies that power them) could reach $12 billion in yearly revenue by 2010, according to research firm iSuppli.

“They are doing good stuff and I’d love to see them hit it big,” said David Sonnen, a senior consultant for spatial information management with the research group IDC. Although it may be a tough sell to persuade an oil company to post its maps, Sonnen said there are plenty of local and state governments that sit on millions of dollars worth of maps that track property lines, utility pipes and address data that they could sell.

That business model has already caught on somewhat in Europe, Sonnen said, with national mapping agencies selling their maps to corporate groups. “How well will this work in the U.S.? Will people all jump on WeoGeo as the place to do this? We don’t know yet. But it certainly seems to me that there are a lot of potential economic systems that are being built around data like maps.”

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at rmullins@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7919.