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

The only thing I can say is, “Wow!” Followed by the biggest grin you have ever seen on my face. As one of 7 finalists, Amazon expresses their confidence in our technology and business strategy. In all honesty, I am humbled and honored by the selection, and truly thank them for their selection of us as one of the 7 finalists.

I believe (passionately) in what we are trying to create. I believe that WeoGeo will change the paradigm in how we discover and access geo-content. I believe that we (the geospatial industry) as a community will more easily synthesize new mapping products that will help us create a better world. But these are my beliefs, and I tend to view everything we do through these rose colored glasses.

The selection as a finalist by Amazon Web Services (AWS) means that someone else out there sees the same potential for the mapping and geo-content industry as we do. It provides validation for the people who have worked so hard on this project beyond anything that I could offer, and for this I am eternally grateful.

In addition, Amazon will offer the winner of this contest a venture investment. I believe this says a lot about the geospatial industry, as well as WeoGeo. For WeoGeo to be among those considered a suitable investment opportunity by a $32 billion dollar company, we must have (1) a great business plan, (2) a great set of technology, and (3) be in an industry with high growth potential. Our industry, the geospatial industry, is now recognized by a leader in internet services industry as having high growth potential.

I’ve been grinning so much, my face hurts…

I have had a number of questions from our private beta Providers that basically ask, “What maps should I be making?” To be honest, I wish I knew. In reality, WeoGeo Market was established to answer this very question.

We set up WeoGeo to lower the risks of creating and selling mapping products (most importantly by reducing marketing and transaction costs). We believe that by lowering the risk of creating and selling geo-content, more products could be created at lower prices. By combining more products at lower prices with a greater ability to find and customize those products, Users of those products would be more apt to purchase more geo-content. The overall goal is to create a truly functioning marketplace for geo-content. The end result would be a collective intelligence expressed through the market that would help all of us focus on making the most valuable geospatial products.

Answering the question of what product to create is one of the hardest parts of running FERI’s operations. While FERI is a research and development organization, we still had to perform the basic sales and marketing efforts of finding paying customers to support our development of value-added mapping products. It is a very time consuming and difficult process, requiring a lot of telephone calls and a lot of travel to search out programs that would value our imaging and mapping efforts. Such is the nature of sales and marketing, and every good salesman would tell you that is just the way you have to generate business.

However, as a scientist I want to focus on the generation of new mapping products. While I could (and still do) focus on sales and marketing, my real interest is in generating new mapping products that could help people make decisions with their resources or help save lives. With the hyperspectral imagery, we could develop maps focused on a variety of topics. These maps could range from Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs or more commonly called red tides) to Submerged Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) to detecting probable locations of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Yet, finding sufficient demand for these products to overcome the high initial production cost of creating these products is difficult. (I have a whole other story on the IEDs and how the DoD does business with contractors and appropriation earmarks that I’ll save for another time.)

Over the years, we have watched with great interest how the internet has impacted other businesses. One of the most interesting impacts that we have seen is the rise of shared intelligence from the accumulation of individual choices. For example, search engines have used the individual linkages of web page creators to develop a collective intelligence estimate of the most likely desired result for a search term (and a new industry of search engine optimization). In particular, we were fascinated by eBay’s ability to enable millions of people to develop larger markets for their niche products.

By establishing a functioning marketplace for these niche goods, eBay created liquidity and demand for products that previously had limited marketability. In the process of creating a market whose niches could be efficiently filled, they also provided opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop new markets. In effect, eBay created a platform that enabled individuals to make choices, create products, and satisfy the needs of others, which in turn created a positive feedback mechanism for everyone who participated. This led to the creation of whole businesses that did not exist prior to eBay, and the rise of the valuation of goods that previously had limited market enetration, and thus, underdetermined recognized value.

The increased liquidity of products and the collective actions of many individuals led to a self-sustaining marketplace that enriches all of the participants. eBay is a lesson in economic theory, and gives truth to the concept that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

So what does this have to do with answering the question from our Providers about which maps to produce? The answer to that question is that I am not sure, but I can make sure that the Provider’s risk is low enough for them to make some reasonable choices, and to give them the agility to respond to market demands. Through this process, I believe that our collective intelligence will point Providers in the most profitable direction.

This marketplace will give those with the skills and those with the content the ability to connect as never before possible. The new network of connections will lead to the creation of new geo-content that will enhance and enrich the lives of our community. And our community will profit from it because we will know which maps to make.

Adena Schutzberg did a podcast with me last week on the business model for WeoGeo. It was my first podcast and I hope that I made sense to people (I welcome comments and/or critiques in the comments section here). I would like to thank Adena for giving us the opportunity to tell our story.

However, I am not sure I was as clear as I could have been about our history and the importance that history in the development of WeoGeo. I could not quite put my finger on what was missing until after the AWS StartUp Event - Boston (see here as well for my comments) when someone asked how many man-years of effort went into developing the site.

My first response was to take the number of years that FERI was in operation times the number of people involved at FERI. Kind of silly, I know. But when I think of why we built WeoGeo, this response seems relevant. Their response, of course, was, “no really, how much technical development time?” I understood the question; the person was trying to ascertain how difficult it would be to recreate what we are doing.

Our technical development on this project did start back around 2001 with a project called Hyperspectral Data Repository On-line (HyDRO). This was our first distribution system, developed to help alleviate the problems associated in delivering HSI data to our customers. This concept and technology eventually evolved into the WeoGeo Server (see post here as well). Between 2001 and 2005 we had 4 PhDs and masters-trained personal spending a portion of their time on HyDRO because it was a critical element of our research programs. In the last couple of years, we increased the number of people working on WeoGeo Market/Server, to >12 currently if you include outside contractors. For the most part, they are highly trained GIS and MIS/CIS/CS personnel.

The technology is hot, no question about it. I am amazed on a daily basis what our group of people has developed for mapping on both commodity computers and utility computing systems. Yet, here is the rub to this type of man-years calculation. I really believe that the reasons for WeoGeo, and its associated development time, stem from our history at FERI, which makes such calculations difficult. The “technical development time” is not just time spent coding; it includes the needs assessment and the development of the system architecture to address critical problems and/or pain. What we have developed at WeoGeo is a direct function of two critical needs of our operations as a research and imagery services organization.

These two critical needs were (and still are):
1) Delivery of our survey grade, high volume mapping content;
2) Finding and acquiring other survey grade mapping content to fuse with ours to create value-added geocontent for our clients.

WeoGeo was built to solve these two critical problems (there are others, but not nearly as critical to our organization as these). If you have never been faced with these problems, then you might not appreciate the depth of the solutions we have built to service these needs (and its potential). But if you have, then you have felt our pain - and I hope value our solution.

The worldwide spatial information management industry has been estimated at ~$50 billion. While large, the industry is dominated by specialization and niche practices that have reduced the flow of spatial information between location-aware enterprises. This reduction in information flow decreases efficiency and productivity within enterprises, and between industries.

Let us examine the different vertical markets that make up the spatial information industry, including urban planning, emergency response, real estate, natural resource management, environmental protection, agriculture, asset management, construction, advertising, etc. They all use slightly different tactics to acquire their spatial awareness or geospatial intelligence (Figure 1; this figure and the next are from a 2007 Where 2.0 presentation. If you are interested in the full presentation let me know.). However, all of these industries have very similar needs in that they require high quality maps to make fundamental (insert your favorite term here, e.g. business, asset, resource, targeting, etc.) decisions.

Figure 1. Vertical silos in the spatial information business keep the markets small and separated.

If we can break down these vertical silos, such that the maps in one niche were used as raw material into the next niche, we can re-order our geospatial markets to look like Figure 2. Here, the silos become building blocks for higher valued information products, which in turn are used as base products for higher valued geo-enabled processes. These building blocks now increase business process efficiency and productivity for the spatially-aware enterprise. As any process manager will tell you, increasing efficiency and productivity is good, really good, because it means you can do more for less.

Figure 2. Silos are changed into building blocks for higher valued industries, increasing efficiency of productivity and resource management.

A recent article from Geoff Zeiss (who was building upon a 2004 article by Paul Teicholz) used the construction industry as an example of the impact of information silos. He first points out the size of the construction industry, worldwide = $2.3 trillion, US = $1.2 trillion. That’s trillion with a T.

Paul’s article examines a decline in construction productivity, during a period when all other industries were looking at increases in productivity (Figure 3). Paul points to a lack of IT integration and R&D by the building industry as a reason for this real fall in productivity, while all other non-farm industries appear to have used IT to become more productive. Geoff goes farther (and I tend to agree with him) that part of the problem relates to the ‘Islands of Information’ that are created, and not shared, by the various disciplines involved with the construction industry:

Disciplines such as architecture, structural engineering, construction, civil engineering, and GIS are classic information silos. Each maintains its own information island comprised of design applications and data. This has created a nightmare for operations and maintenance, emergency planners and responders, urban planners, and others who require seamless access to urban terrain including building interiors and exteriors, roads and highways, and above ground and underground utilities. The biggest challenge is not typically data, because the data that would help these folks already exists because much of (sic) it is created when buildings and infrastructure were designed. The biggest challenge is that islands of information and technology make it difficult to integrate existing data in a seamless view.

Figure 3. Labor productivity declines 1964-2003. (from ACEbytes Viewpoint #4)

WeoGeo was started to specifically address the creating, sharing, and marketing of geospatial content that will help increase the productivity of spatially-aware industries. We have built an easy to use interface and system to rapidly list, host, discover, customize, and deliver value added geo-intelligence in a way that generates revenue for content providers, which will be affordable for content users. We are using a classic exchange mechanism to create a neomarket to “remake” the silos into “connections” between the islands of geospatial information (I know I am mixing metaphors, but I couldn’t help it. Sorry.)

Does it matter? Are there enough inefficiencies to be found that will translate into dollars to make a difference? Here is another quote from Geoff’s piece:

Several years ago the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) commissioned a study on Interoperability to attempt to quantify the efficiency losses in the U.S. capital facilities industry… NIST estimated that in 2002 poor interoperability cost the US capital facilities industry $15.8 billion.

That leaves some room for improvement in efficiency. And this is just one spatially-aware industry. An increase in productivity in these industries will create a more efficient use of (natural) resources, which over time creates a positive feedback into the quality of operations (and life) for all those using planetary resources.

I posted last week about bandwidth issues associated with geospatial data and our AWS S3 solution. The deciding factor for us to use Amazon’s offerings was not necessarily the edge distribution capabilities of S3, but the synergy from combining S3 data storage and distribution with virtual computing capabilities of EC2. There are multiple issues in image processing that require a ton of memory space and CPU horsepower. In both Market and Server, we offer the following basic map distribution options to our map providers -

Geo Clipping (6 zoom levels, allowing for ~125 million possible selections per data set)
Spatial Resampling (4 levels)
Layer Resampling (depends on data)
Output File types (5 - JPEG, GeoTIFF, ENVI, ESRI BIL, ERDAS IMG)
Projections (5 - UTM, Transverse Mercator, Lambert Conic, Albers Equal, Geographic)
Datums (3 - WGS84, NAD 83, NAD 27)

These options result in millions of possible map variants, which preclude the storage of each variant for distribution. So processing power for conversion is critical; and this processing power needs to be connected to a large, web-addressable, temporary data storage array to house the unique variant that a map user has selected. Now for a true mapping marketplace, this infrastructure needs to support 100s to possibly 1000s of simultaneous map requests from the same base map like the 40 GB image in Figure 1. Doing our NeoMapping Market correctly requires the creation of enormous processing, storage, and bandwidth infrastructure.

Figure 1. 40 GB, 156 layer HyperSpectral Imagery (HSI) map listed on WeoGeo Market. (Click on image to go to the listing in the Market).

However, who could afford that infrastructure upfront? Our original estimates for acquiring base computation needs and placing them into a co-location facility were around $500K. While not a lot of money in the scale of today’s internet operations, it was big for us. In addition, we were trying to develop the software architecture to support the Market and Server, and these expenses were large in it of themselves. AWS provided a unique and simultaneous answer to many of our immediate storage, processing, and distribution needs.

Developing our infrastructure on the scalable AWS solution allows us to say we can support the 1000s of map requests required for a functioning digital marketplace. The user experience is vital to the service’s credibility and therefore our success. However, there is a true (and in a number of cases unexpectedly high) cost in this decision. We traded high capital expenditures for high operating expenditures. In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about the Total Cost of Operations (TCO) on AWS, and some of the ways we are moving to reduce these high operating expenses through stability and scaling solutions. Some of these solutions we have turned into products that we provide to others (e.g WeoCEO)..

I would be interested in hearing about the actual experience of others on AWS and whether S3 and EC2 could or could not meet their needs.

I ran into an interesting article on the Amazon Web Services Blog on Metropix. The company appears to be trying to help real estate agents market properties with the creation of 2 and 3-D floor plans available properties. (They are using S3 to host their data files).

What struck me was a comment at the end of the blog, which stated “that content is still king on the Net.” In this case, the content is a form of geospatial content, just not a form that we in the professional services industry might think of as geospatial content. The GIS or survey community might overlook this content as being advertising or marketing driven, not the quantitative content that you could determine water flows through a flood plain or predict this season’s forest fire.

However, Metropix’s content is a shining example of what I believe will be an explosion of “geospatial” content. Any digital content that can be tied to a point of the ground that has value to another should be considered geospatial. This wider view dramatically expands our “traditional” concept of geospatial content, and points the way to a larger future for our field.

The question will be how to monetize this digital information. The most frequently used revenue stream in the professional services field is direct consulting services sales (e.g CH2M Hill), but there are many individual companies that are also providing direct internet sales of data to their customers (e.g Digital Globe). I would put Metropix in this category of revenue. There is of course the advertising-based model that would appear to be Google Earth’s focus (in spite of the sales of Pro and Enterprise editions).

We believe that the WeoGeo model, which combines the marketing of digital data with the services of discovery, customization, hosting, and delivery, as well as the content and derivative license management will help facilitate the expansion of the geospatial content market. A bigger geomarket helps us all generate more revenues, drawing more people and better content to the field.

I’ll match the “content is king” quote with this one, “A rising tide raises all boats.”

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.

I have been a traveling extensively over the last couple of weeks, so I am a bit behind in my entries. Last week I was at the Location Intelligence (LI) Conference and the Web 2.0 Expo. I met Andrew Turner, who gave the most lucid and informative talk on Neogeography that I have ever heard at Web 2.0 Expo. He and Mikel Maron gave a longer workshop on the subject at LI (missed that one, but I was at the Expo with the AWS crowd). One of our guys attended and said that it was excellent as well.

We spent some time with these guys, moving back and forth between the conferences, and showed them the private beta of WeoGeo. What struck me about the conversations was how quickly we meshed on the subject of maps, Web 2.0 applications, and neogeography. What was really amazing was how many coincident lines of thought that we had in common. It was as if we were all tuned into the same psychic hotline. We were nearly completing sentences for each other.

We as a group came from vastly different locations and backgrounds and have never met each other. Yet we had such similar thoughts on the same subject that it strikes me as something to notice. Now it is clear that we were a self-selecting group, since we were attending both LI and Web 2.0 Expo; one would expect some amount of coordinated thoughts. It was so enjoyable just to sit and talk maps and neogeography that I didn’t pay much attention to the coordination of our thought.

What really caused me to focus on this “group” think from people who never met, was the post from Adena Schutzberg. Adena was tremendously busy at this conference. When she wasn’t leading a session, everyone wanted a piece of her time. I was one of the fortunate ones to get a couple minutes with her. The post she wrote about us (and me) was awesome. How she got this in that short of a period of time suggests to me (and amazes me) that she is tapped into the same hotline as the Andrew, Mikel, and I.

Which brings me to the title of this post – these incidences (as well as some others) suggest to me that our field - geography, mapping, neogeography, whatever you want to call it - may be approaching a point of supersaturation. This is the point in a chemical solution where the input of a very small seed causes the whole solution to change state and create something beautiful and solid, where before there was nothing but a slurry of potential. I think that neogeography may be in this state of supersaturation. I don’t know what will cause the crystallization of our field into something new and beautiful, but I look forward to that event.

I would really like to thank Adena, Mikel and Andrew for their wonderful posts. We will work very hard to achieve the potential that they have expressed for our ideas and WeoGeo.

I ran across a recent post by Roger Hart at GeoCarta that highlighted a remote sensing market report (BCC Research) suggesting the total world-wide market for remote sensing products was on order of $7 billion in 2006. This number is similar to the $3.6 billion for 2006 estimated by Daratech, if you remove weather forecasting and climate change studies from their 2006 estimate.

These are big numbers. However, the total remote sensing and geospatial market are also segmented, with lots of niches that make it difficult for developing economies of scale in the collection of data, or the creation of derivative products.

I have a sense that this is changing. In other words, that the growing demand for products will run right into the ability of individuals to create content using base maps provided by large scale mapping projects (e.g. NAIP). I believe that we may be approaching a cusp period in the development of geospatial markets, where the benefits of low cost powerful servers and commodity computing (a la Amazon Web Services EC2/S3), combined with the robust open source geospatial software (e.g. GDAL) and the innovative power of individuals and small businesses, will begin to impact the traditional government services model. I see the impact to be greater supplies of content at lower cost points, resulting in an ever increasing demand for geospatial products.

I am not quite sure who wins or loses in this period. I would like to think that a rising tide raises all boats. I do think that it will be a period of rapid change, so if you are doing the same old thing, with the same old tools, it might be time to reassess your business model.