SotM 2010 session: Cocktails on the Titanic? Business models Panel discussion
 State Of The Map 2010 Session |
There were two parts to this session.
I introduced a panel discussion about business models with a few slides likening the massive changes that geobusinesses are facing to the iceberg that did the unthinkable and sunk the greatest ocean liner of its age, the Titanic. The panel consisted of
- Christian Petersen, CloudMade
- Randy Meech, AOL
- Roger Mueller, Logiball
- Robert Soden, Development Seed
- Matt Quinlan, Bing
Conclusion seemed to be that it was increasingly difficult to get people to pay for anything geo in the consumer space except through the medium of advertising. Well targeted geo-adverts can attract a substantially higher rate per view/click. In the B2B space, service, quality and finding niches were the panel's suggestions.
Then we had 5 elevator pitches from small geo businesses and startups trying to answer the Who, What, Why and How Much questions. There is a bit of background in a blog post I wrote for SotM and links to my blog.
The 5 pitchers were
- Nutiteq (nutiteq.com) - Jaak Laineste
- Nogago (nogago.com) -
- Spiffymap (spiffymap.com) -
- Curly Brackets (curlybrackets.de & offmaps.com) - Felix Lamouroux
- Geofabrik (geofabrik.de) - Frederik Ramm
And the community vote by a substantial margin went to Frederik Ramm and Geofabrik who provide consulting services around OpenStreetMap. As the winner was announced, Nestoria presented Geofabrik with a prize