deCarta Wants You!

I sat down with Kim Fennell, CEO of deCarta (formerly Telcontar) for a discussion about his company’s business model and product plans. deCarta has been successful at winning four of the big six mapping portals for geospatial processing: Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Rand McNally (so, they have not won over and Microsoft and MapQuest…yet). And they are working on upgrading their capabilities in international geocoding, traffic modeling (in a partnership with Inrix), landmark routing, among others. deCarta/Telcontar has weathered a number of changes over the course of their corporate developement but they now seem poised for expansion by attracting developers (see the deCarta Developer Zone) to their platform in hopes of attracting partners who can develop successful niche applications, which already include some of the more prominent companies in the LBS space like Wavemarket, Motorola, TeleNav, Netorks in Motion, and Local Matters. Fennell says they are content agnostic and was very clear in pointing out that "we’re not a GIS company." But, let’s face it, their Drill Down Server is already a very robust mapping and spatial querying platform. Fennel mentioned some of the interest they have had from large corporations about using their platform. Granted, they have a long way to go with name recognition and just being the "Intel Inside" of the mapping world for these major mapping portals doesn’t really give them much exposure. But they have a goal of attracting a larger partner network with the recent hire of Mike Agron, formerly the partner channel director for MapInfo.

Platial’s Angels

I spoke breifly to Di-Ann Eisnor, founder of Platial.com about her business model for Platial. Platial allows you to annotate a Google Map with annecdotes and information about a particular location. Eisnor’s goal now is to push adoption of her company’s concept and platform to encourage social networking using a map metaphor for very localized information. She hopes to encourage local organizations like retail associations to help promote her service to small, local businesses. It is basically an advertising model but there is still a huge question about how much a small local business would spend for limited exposure. But it’s not stopping Kleiner Perkins Caufield, Omidyar Network, and Jack Dangermond from becoming angel investors.

AOL and OpenAIM

I spoke at length with Alan Keister, a development executive at America Online, who elaborated on AOL’s news to release a location-based component of AIM. AOL announced the enhancements to the Open AIM SDK which includes APIs for an LBS to support the location of people in your buddy list. AOL is encouraging developers to download and use the SDK to develop viable business applications. So much so that although the API is free to download and there is a limit on the number of transactions you can make on the AOL mapping service, there is no charge at this point. If your application maxes out your transaction limit, you are encouraged to contact AOL but Keister was non-commital on the charge for additional transactions.

Competition in the LBS Market: “A bare knuckles brawl”

"A bare knuckles brawl," is how Joe Astroth, vice president of Autodesk Location Services described the competition for location-based services (LBS) platform tools and services. But his division at Autodesk is winning business as it did just recently in securing Disney Mobile as a customer for its LocationLogic platform. Disney Mobile will begin to offer services in June 2006 and will operate as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) by licensing frequency spectrum from Sprint.

When asked why cellular operators have more recently started to launch LBS applications, Astroth said, "Carriers run in a herd." But he offered other reasons why the LBS marketplace is heating up. "In LBS, handsets had to be there, and it took a long time; graphics had to be appealing; keyboards and text entry had to get better…bigger than that is ubiquitous broadband," said Astroth. He mention that just as growth in the internet was the result of getting beyond the 56K download speeds, the same inflection point is occuring with LBS in that broadband availability can now support many LBS applications. In addition, Astroth feels there is a deeper understanding about location-smart devices that is creating consumer demand.


And Astroth confirmed that there is no truth to the rumor that Autodesk Location Services is going away anytime soon.

It’s 10 PM - Do you know where your kids are?

Well, if you are a Sprint/Nextel customer you can find out. Under a plan announced just last week, Sprint offers the Sprint Family Locator Service for $9.95 per month for up to four registered phones. The service offers the basic information about the location of anyone with a cell phone that is enabled under the plan. A parent can "ping" a phone to determine the whereabouts of the individual and view the location on either the parent’s phone or via the web interface. So, Sprint becomes the first U.S. carrier to offer a personal locator service and I’m sure more will follow.

What I did not see that the service offered was a perimeter alert so that a parent can be notified if a child leaves a certain geographic area; i.e. a "geofencing" feature. Even Wherify’s Wherifone does not offer that feature now but had touted it rather strongly in the past. In speaking with Scott Hotes, CTO of Wavemarket, the provider of the location technology for Sprint, he said they opted instead to offer "safety checks" whereby the service does a daily location check against the family member alerting the parent, for example, if the child is not in the designated location. Hotes said that the check may be time sensitive as well. For example, if a child is not in school by 9:00 a.m. or home by 3:00 p.m. an alert is sent.

Now, this service may seem somewhat specific to certain income group…i.e. a family tha can afford phones for every kid, but as many will observe, if they don’t have one now, the cost will surely decline in the future so that nearly everyone will have a "personal" communication device that is also a PND (personal navigation device). That’s happening at a very rapid pace as this recent press release from ABI Research indicates.