Mobile Portland: Maps and Mobile — A Rapidly Changing Landscape June 22, 2009

What happens when everyone has devices in their pockets that know where they are and can display engaging maps? That's exactly what innovative company Platial has been exploring since 2005.

Platial CEO Di-Ann Eisnor and VP of Product Jason WIlson will talk about mobile mapping at Mobile Portland's June Meeting. Di-Ann's description of their topic was so good that we're quoting it verbatim:

"My daughter's school has an activity called 'junkbox,' where you make stuff based on whatever scraps you find in a box of reused components and objects.

Because both maps and mobile are in rapid iterative development, mobile maps developers have been in a constant state of junkbox; we've gleaned scraps of location data, bits of APIs, and grasped at revenue models but there haven't been enough of the right elements to make something truly wonderful.

This helps explain why a few services like Loopt, Platial Nearby and Whhrl have seen some success but nothing on the scale of Twitter or Facebook.

On Friday, our box was endowed with a shiny new item; location-aware web browsing at least for iPhone, and with it, Map Kit and new payment models.

Now, web developers will be able to create location-based apps for iPhone, drastically increasing the number of services which can integrate location.

This, in addition to recent releases of geodata APIs and location APIs bring the vision of mobile mapping to reality almost surely leading to augmented reality, truly social maps serving a global purpose, better filtered & analyzed content.

Platial Nearby is directing all of this toward specific contextual location filters. We'll talk about this and show some examples of what we're making now."

About Di-Ann & Jason

Di-Ann Eisnor is CEO and Co-founder of Platial, The People's Atlas, a widely used social mapping platform for the web and iPhone. Di-Ann is working toward using social mapping for cultural diplomacy across the globe through community engagement.

Jason WIlson is VP Product and Co-founder of Platial. He focuses on the UI and product direction across all of the Platial properties with an emphasis on web services and iPhone.

About Platial

Platial, The People's Guide to Who and What's Nearby, is a free resource where people around the world share and discover all kinds of Places. Platial was founded to connect people globally by making everywhere more accessible.

Social mapping can illustrate a post geo-political picture of the world that allows people with shared interests to leap geographic boundaries. The network of Platial maps, including Frappr, which we acquired in 2007 is distributed on over 500,000 sites a month and on the iPhone to over 350,000 users.

Platial has contributed over 300 Million geographically referenced pieces of media including photo, video, stories, people to the Geospatial web at large. Platial is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Sherpalo Ventures and KeyNote Ventures and Omidyar Network among others.

Official Website: http://mobileportland.com