By David Cohen, Colorado Startups
Read the original article here
November 27, 2006
There
has clearly been a great deal of interest in getting simplified yet
powerful mapping capability into the hands of the masses. Microsoft has
tried to fill this gap in MS Office twice, first with the excel mapping
tool and later with MapPoint. It’s never really worked. My
experience with this sort of thing is that I can easily whip out simple
point plots based on zip codes, but these tools break down when you
want do anything a little more sophisticated. They’re decent at
visualization of static data, but not so good at helping you to spot or
predict trends.
Enter Mud Springs, which was
founded in 1999 as a GIS consulting company. It’s a familiar story -
some really cool tools come out of consulting companies who build stuff
just because they needed it and couldn’t find it (which, of course is
how many successful companies get started). Mud Springs is re-inventing
itself and is trying to bring their product (aWhere) to the broader market. aWhere is all about ease of use, and it’s evident when you get the product demo.
“AWhere is designed for ease of use and specifically
for data dissemination (our patent-pending Exchange technology - one
file containing all shapefiles with color rending, projection, metadata
etc.). In this way, I can send a gigabyte of simulation results (>
50 shapefiles) to a user all bundled in one file. With MyMaps, I can
’save’ and deliver through AWhere Exchange the exact views of the data
I want my client to see - and with these views, our clients are
exploring their data in minutes.” - Founder, John Corbett.
I also really liked that you can just throw an excel spreadsheet at
it, and it immediately visualizes the relevant data and automatically
updates as you change the underlying spreadsheet (sort of like COM/OLE
that just works like you’d expect).
I think that mapping users fall into three categories today.
Consumers, who use simple tools like MapPoint or Google Maps, those
using vertical solutions (such as the public safety system that my
previous company built), and those who use sophisticated systems like ESRI.
Mud Springs believes there’s a whole class of under-served people like
you and me who need more power than simple consumer tools provide,
don’t use a vertical solution, and will never invest the time and money
in high-end GIS but who still have reasons to visualize their data in
order to spot important trends or arrive at actionable conclusions.
aWhere sells for about $700 per seat. At this price point, it’s
still an investment for the “every man.” I suspect that Mud Springs
will find pretty good success in first attacking specific verticals
that know they want these types of solutions but don’t want to have
dedicated GIS staff and mess with the hard to learn high end tools like
ESRI provides. Hopefully they can focus there and learn more about what
it takes to bring mapping to the “non-specialists” of the world. I
think they’ll need to get the price point down to a hundred bucks to
really make it interesting to everyone.
Mud Springs is currently raising angel investment in advance of a planned venture round. | 
