GlobalMotion, a wiki for real places
GlobalMotion 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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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
