Spatial is Special – There’s a (M)App for That

Part 2 – A New Hope

There have been some interesting conversations across the blogosphere on Google’s entrance into the basemap and navigation business. From an interested spectator point-of-view, I am a bit of a fan of the sheer audacity of Google’s mapping effort; creating a US basemap from scratch, building a navigation application, and rolling out a real-time sensor network (with 76 million devices) disguised as a mobile phone, all in the space of a couple of years. Well, that’s just crazy.  However, as much as I am a fan, this event is just one more example of the impacts of rapidly changing technology in our field (Part 1), making previous niches obsolete and forcing individuals (James Fee) and companies (e.g. Cloudmade) to adjust business models to just survive.

Geo-powered apps are changing the game for developers

There were a couple of themes from these conversations that I found interesting. The first was represented by Peter Batty (and links therein), which could be broadly interpreted as “Content Matters”. That is, the cost (or lack there of) of the navigation application was less than important than the base content within it. The second theme was summarized by a podcast at Directions Magazine, which posited that the data didn’t matter. Adena and Joe’s point of view was that the application was going to overshadow the importance of the content. They felt that the application cost, functionality, and ease of use would generate more relative value than the content. I personally believe that both these points are two sides of the same business coin, and to be successful in this space you will have to have both great content, and a great marketing and delivery application.

Let’s start with the Batty et al.’s assertion that “Content is King”. In a frictionless marketplace of ideas and data, where the process of disintermediation has reached its peak, the lines of competition will be drawn around product price, branding (think Crest versus Colgate) and quality (think GM versus Lexus). This suggests that our market will continue to separate between the aggregation of (free) commodity data (10 meter USGS Digital Elevation Maps) and premium data (nationwide parcel data). I have been a proponent of premium content for a couple of years and I see it as a bright spot for geospatial professionals because good content tends to be localized providing niche geo-opportunities locally, across the globe.

An example of “premium-content-is-winning” may be found in the newspaper industry

Wall Street Journal's premium content drives growth

The Wall Street Journal has maintained its subscription-based revenue model all through the “content-should-be-free” era of the internet. It is now the only major newspaper in the US with a growing circulation, and is the nation’s largest newspaper by circulation. They demonstrate that the quality of content matters, and will continue to matter moving forward. Looking more closely at the difference in content provided by the #1 Wall Street Journal and the #2 USA Today, the Wall Street Journal might be considered a “premium” niche player, compared to the generic “consumer” news offer by the USA Today. Generic news may be found in a lot of places (for free). In the spatial industry, we might compare this to the “free” generic DEMS offered by the USGS and the “premium” high-resolution LiDAR surveys by companies such as Merrick. Clearly, quality content has value and people are willing to pay for it.

But Adena and Joe have a point. We consume digital content differently than other commodities such as toothpaste. Even if today’s premium navigation data becomes a commodity by virtue of the “less-the-free” data offered by Google, the data must still be delivered via a service and application that people wish to use. The consumption of content, and the value-added services built on top of the content, will depend directly on the quality of the application that delivers that content. In this case, the application will matter as much as the content. If either fails to deliver, the whole effort will fail.

While we may currently consider ourselves either data providers or application developers/integrators, I think our industry will move towards a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) industry, where the data and applications are inextricably tied. I believe this will be the case for all platforms, including web, mobile, and desktop. And in this new DaaS era, the geospatial integrators may have an edge because they are used to thinking about data and applications simultaneously.

In addition, the economic process that is currently squeezing the revenues of integrators and GIS professionals may be turned to work in their favor, as the many sources of free, low cost, or open source software becomes their application supply chain. In the past, these integrators thought about their customer’s data and its integration within a proprietary mapping software stack. In the future, they have an opportunity to become vendors of DaaS, either for their customers, or for themselves. The combination of accessible data (low-cost or free) with low-cost applications and hosting will enable these professional to create premium DaaS niches, recouping the profit margins lost to the commodization of their IT skill set.

This is one path towards a new, hopeful future where the geospatial professional controls the fate of their destiny, rather than trying to survive on the leavings of giants.

A new hope for Geo-Jedi’s