GlobalMotion, a wiki for real places

August 29, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

globalmotion-logo.bmpGlobalMotion is showing up rather late to the party to create a wiki company for real-world places.

You can think of the Palo Alto, Calif. company as a sort of Wikipedia for places, but driven by users uploading photos that are geotagged, who then draw markings around maps and add articles.

For example, a person migt upload a picture of the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone Park. Globalmotion integrates a map, a rating system and other features to create a single page for that place.

The company follows a host of similar companies and efforts. There’s Platial, Google Mymaps and Wikimapia.org, for example, all focused around maps and self-expression around places. And there are already entries at Wikipedia for well-known places (see Old Faithful’s entry).

GlobalMotion was started by Joost Schreve, a travel enthusiast, after raising a couple of hundred thousand dollars in angel money, and he’s pondering raising a round of up to $1 million. The site launched Tuesday in partnership with another site launched by Schreve, EveryTrail, which offers a way to upload location-tagged (GPS) photos. He says he hope to be profitable by later this year.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • For this subject, take a look at http://tellmewhere.com, the English version of a French project of Encyclopedia of hyperlocal places. In US, look at Greensboro and Burlington.These two cities have been described by two fanatic members !!!
  • I just checked out the site and think its a great idea and am hoping that other travel enthusiasts check it out and use it as this could be really useful. I also really like the design on EveryTrail. Very intuitive.

    It's also great to see young companies thinking about profitability (profitable this year!). What's the business model? Ads, travel leads, anything else?

    - Julio
    Experience Project
  • Matt, thanks for checking out GlobalMotion. We definitely will keep you up
    to date on our progress.
    Joost
  • Mitchell Miller
    Cool sight and fairly easy to figure out (even for a non-web savvy guy like myself). The Flickr integration offers a great way to compliment my personal photos.