We launched WeoGeo yesterday at the O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose - a milestone I’m obviously very happy to have reached, as we have been working on WeoGeo for nearly the last two years. During this development period I have been constantly asked, “What is WeoGeo?” I am finally glad to be able to tell our story.

It’s about breaking the content cycle.

The map exchange business currently requires large investments in equipment, software, and personnel to facilitate the sale of most data maps, yet our revenue opportunities tend to be limited to negotiated contracts, where each map product is delivered to a single buyer. Why? Because our ~$4 billion market is one of stove-piped verticals, where mappings skills do not translate well across the horizontal breath of mapping needs. This market is growing, yet fragmented; ripe for the necessary restructuring that will enable significant growth.

It’s about shifting the exchange paradigm.

This paradigm in the mapping business limits content creation, value-added application development, and, ultimately, profits in our industry. We seek to create a new paradigm in the mapping world where content and skills are as important as contacts and capitalization. And so to accomplish this, we are launching a “NeoMapping Market,” where buyers and sellers of mapping content can communicate via a transaction-based exchange. A marketplace where the fees are kept to a minimum to support enhanced availability of supply and increased demand of products. A digital marketplace where a product need only be made once yet can be sold many times.

It’s about reinventing the license and royalty model.

Ultimately, the highest valued product on this planet is intellectual property (IP). The potential value of geographic IP itself makes it one of the greatest untapped resources of our era. So how do we enable the creation of a viable geospatial marketplace for the exchange of this data? To create a true digital IP marketplace, we have to change the Digital Rights Management (DRM) model. Mapping products are ultimately about the skill and tools used to create the content, yet the vast majority of our most useful mapping products go largely unused because of onerous licensing terms. The current licensing model adopted by our industry creates a supply (S0) and demand (D0) curve similar to this graph. Yet if we want to move from a $4 billion market to a $40 billion market, we must transition to the curves much more like S1 and D1, where the total size of the market is greater, with greater availability and accessibility to products. To accomplish this, we must break the current constraints of the mapping DRM model, and develop new ones where content creators (sellers) are paid for their efforts regardless of who uses or buys the content while buyers are allowed to develop value-added derivatives without limitations.

It’s about changing the buying process.

A marketplace for the highest value geographic IP will not be successful without a consistent and easy search mechanism. We have sought to create such a place, where sellers have the capability to list their high-resolution products on a global level, using a simple, yet powerful, interface. An online market allowing sellers to offer portions of their data at similarly fractioned prices, thus enabling buyers to select only what they require and spend only what they need. For buyers, such a marketplace offers the ability to quickly sort all mapping products in an area, including derivative products from popular maps. It also lets buyers track any lineage of derivative works to assess the quality and popularity of each derivative product.

It’s about re-envisioning Web 2.0 technologies.

Our mapping products are global in nature and (greater than) petabytes in size. An easy interface alone is insufficient for a world-wide geo IP market; it must be backed by the necessary technology to move such mountains. Specifically, WeoGeo is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a global leader in ecommerce, Amazon has created their own a paradigm shift in the cluster computing market with AWS. From commodity computing cycles to scalable bandwidth and storage capacity, AWS’ services provide WeoGeo with the necessary platform to make a NeoMapping Market a global reality.

Join us in making it happen. Let us change the way we value our skills, ideas, and mapping content. And in the process, let us change the way we value the world.