I'm incredibly thrilled to share the news that Mapufacture, my company co-founded with Mikel, will be joining FortiusOne. Mikel, and Seanshare their thoughts on BrainOff and the GeoCommons blog and here is the official press release.

Building Mapufacture has been an incredible experience. What started out as a project to demonstrate an index of a new format called GeoRSS grew into a company that effectively demonstrated geospatial aggregation and provided free mapping tools to organizations and individuals around the world.

Being an entrepreneur means there is no definition of evenings, weekends or holidays. As a small company, everyone is responsible for development, management, accounting, business, public relations, server maintenance and more. It's exhilarating and exhausting. Over the past several years, Mikel and I have been proponents of open data and services, and saw the GeoWeb become a complex, and fast-paced domain.

The evolution of Mapufacture

Joining FortiusOne means we now have the support of a larger company and infrastructure to better support and build these ideas. The GeoCommons team is stellar - we have been working closely with them this year on a variety of projects such as interoperability testbeds, geodata federation, lightweight metadata standards, and KML standardization.

Mapufacture + FortiusOne

As Sean talked about in his post, GeoCommons has been approaching a different aspect of the GeoWeb. GeoCommons Finder! is a powerful infrastructure for hosting and utilizing large, complex geodata sets. By contrast, Mapufacture is focused on tying into the dynamic geoweb of syndicated data and web services. We've built adapters to many social and map making sites, as well as generally gathering up the available GeoRSS and KML that has been emerging and providing interfaces to find, visualize, and access these in a variety of formats. The goal is to allow utilization of personalized data sets produced by any other toolset.

Together the complex, but widely used large data sets, combined with the varied and dynamic feeds provides users with complete flexibility in using geospatial visualization and analysis to address whatever situation is important to them. The data continues to be free, so users are able to find, combine, and save this data for use in other appropriate applications. Joining together Mapufacture and FortiusOne will incredibly accelerate the realization of this concept.

We fully appreciate all the help our supporters have provided over the years - and believe that now is an incredibly exciting time for Where2.0.

"Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning."

- Benjamin Franklin