Musings of a Marketing Maven

When you live near Microsoft and Amazon.com’s cor­po­rate cam­puses, you can run into some amaz­ing peo­ple while gro­cery shop­ping, enjoy­ing a latte, or exer­cis­ing. Today I had one of those serendip­i­tous encounters.

While power walk­ing in the late after­noon sun­shine, I heard about a cool new com­pany that a col­league launched a few weeks ago at DEMO. (She was wear­ing her DEMO hat while walk­ing, tak­ing a break while her daugh­ter was at bal­let class.)

Her com­pany is Earth­Mine, and it aspires to cap­ture photo-realistic urban envi­ron­ments in 3D and store the result­ing geo-spatial data as an “urban inven­tory” that will enable bazil­lions of appli­ca­tions to emerge. How about that for a mouthful?

Earth­Mine is a plat­form play in the geo-spatial arena, a crit­i­cal build­ing block for future location-based ser­vices in major cities. Ini­tially it will lead to invalu­able and highly func­tional appli­ca­tions for munic­i­pal gov­ern­ments, util­i­ties, and infra­struc­ture providers.

For exam­ple, just imag­ine how much more effi­cient cities could be if the pub­lic works guys actu­ally had a 3D map of all the below-ground pipes, con­duits, gas lines, sew­ers, etc. — linked to the inter­sec­tions and places of inter­est nearby, with highly detailed GPS coor­di­nates. Think what it might mean for com­pa­nies try­ing to install cell tow­ers or fixed wire­less trans­mit­ters on top of tall buildings.

Here’s how the founders describe their orig­i­nal vision:

[While in grad school,] we had an idea that if we could inte­grate panoramic pho­tographs with geo-spatial data we could cap­ture and deliver photo-realistic 3D envi­ron­ments that would accu­rately doc­u­ment our world.

Assum­ing Earth­Mine gets the cap­i­tal they need to scale the busi­ness, within a year or so major cities in the US will have been pho­tographed and mapped in 3D with detailed geo-spatial attrib­utes. Given the mag­ni­tude of the under­tak­ing — “cre­at­ing an urban inven­tory” — this will prob­a­bly fol­low the path of all sig­nif­i­cant tech­nol­ogy inno­va­tions. It will start with B2B and gov­ern­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties where pay-offs are huge, ratio­nal­iz­ing the large invest­ment, before mak­ing its way into the con­sumer arena.

The founders dream that this tech­nol­ogy will some­day be used to power all sorts of appli­ca­tions that make con­sumers’ lives eas­ier and more pleasurable:

We have been try­ing hard to make it an expe­ri­ence that peo­ple can relate to. Stand­ing on the street with a map in hand — it should be that easy.

It will be inter­est­ing to see the appli­ca­tions and mar­kets that are cre­ated by tech­nolo­gies like this.

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