How do you make a geospatial exchange a reality? You find great content providers to bring their wares to the market. Aerials Express (AEX) is one of those great content providers. With 420,000 square miles of high resolution aerial imagery over major metropolitan areas in the US (see map below), AEX brings base map content to “prime-the-pump” in the derivative product marketplace.

Christopher Warren and Bill Landis at AEX have been great. Their listings of AEX products address a big niche in our industry. High resolution imagery that can be physically acquired and manipulated with an explicit license to resell derivative works. Bill’s quote from the Press Release -

WeoGeo is an excellent opportunity for our company, said Bill Landis, President of Aerials Express. We are looking to WeoGeo’s advanced technology and unique distribution model to enhance the availability of our products into a wider range of GIS related markets.

It says a lot about the potential of an exchange-based market for our industry.

We will do our absolute best to make the market technology easy to use for search, discovery, and product acquisition. Its success will increase productivity and margins for all of its participants. Today, we mark its beginning.

There is a nice discussion happening on James Fee’s Blog about Web Mapping Systems and Services and the future of hosted mapping services. I was reading it and thought back to an interesting Wall Street Journal article on Monday about Circuit City that said same store sales in December fell by 12% in the US. While this news was depressing for the stock market, the silver lining for the geo-community was that navigational products were the only product line with increasing sales over the period.

Geo-devices are becoming more ubiquitous. The shear number of curious and talented people moving into our industry combined with these devices will drive product and service innovation in directions that may not be completely clear at the moment.

Converging with the mass market penetration of geo-devices and geo-content (geoware?) is the cloud computing efforts by AWS (and soon to be others). While the production of quality mapping today may require high end desktop workstations and servers, I think that Moore’s Law is eventually going to allow our field to produce geo-content and services far more easily, leading to a feedback into future product innovation. How we in the professional community create products and services today may be radically different in the future.

I offer this anecdote - today, after 10 years of running a Microsoft Exchange Server for our email requirements, we switched to Google Mail Premium. Over the 10 year period, we incurred costs of $10,000s, possibly greater than $100,000. These costs included licensing, hardware, server room, service personnel, etc. Our spam filter alone on the MSFT Exchange Server costs us $35 per year per mailbox. Our costs for Google Mail Premium service is $50 a mailbox per year. It is an easier to use, cheaper to implement, and offers more robust service than the Exchange product.

I think there might be parallels for our industry in this anecdote. It is probably a good exercise to be thinking about what products might be replacing the ones we are using today.

The future of GIS, geo-content, geo-entertainment, etc. will belong to those who can think outside of the traditional methods of production and product delivery. For historical evidence of the difference between companies that focus on the future and those that focus on their current narrow niche, look at the change in market capitalization of Trimble (TRMB) and Garmin (GRMN) over the last decade.

Above Chart taken from Google Finance