Platial And The NeoGeographers

I met Di-Ann Eisnor of Platial at the recent Etech in San Diego. Although she wasn’t presenting at the show, I wish she had: she gave a short talk during a press lunch, and it was a great intimation of things to come at the upcoming Where 2.0 conference (scheduled for 13-14 June in San Jose) that I wrote about here.

Di-Ann was in the news twice today. The first piece I read was early this morning in the New York Times, where Platial was characterized as a mash-up:

[from Wary of a New Web Idea That Rings Old by KATIE KAFNER]

LAST September, when Di-Ann Eisnor, a 33-year-old entrepreneur, traveled to Silicon Valley to pitch her start-up business to venture capitalists, she stayed calm by reminding herself that it would be like mingling with strangers at a party. There might be instant rapport with some, while conversations with others might wither and die on the spot.

Indeed, Ms. Eisnor clicked so well with people she met at two venture firms — Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Omidyar Network — that both firms signed on to invest in her company, Platial, an online mapping service.

But when it comes to venture capital and so-called mash-ups like Platial — a new breed of Web-based application that mixes data from different online sources — Ms. Eisnor’s luck appears to be the exception to the rule.

Many venture capital firms are loath to finance mash-ups, in part because they are not readily “defensible,” meaning they might be replicated by others.

“The current things people are doing with Google Maps are cute but they don’t add value,” said Peter Rip, managing director of Leapfrog Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif.

Nonetheless, Kleiner Perkins and Omidyar Network, which was started by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, both decided to take a chance by making a small investment in Platial, which is based in Portland, Ore. The sum has not been disclosed, but Russell Siegelman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said his firm was acting more like an angel investor, whose investments are typically small, usually $250,000 to $500,000.

“We treated this as an experiment, a very interesting experiment, one we’re excited about,” Mr. Siegelman said.

I guess it’s spun as a mash-up since it leverages Google maps? But Platial is more substantial than that.

Later today, I stumbled on a Wired piece about Platial:

[from Wired News: Map Mashups Get Personal by Annalee Newitz]

Platial provides a home for people who love quirky geographical information or just want to mark the locations that have meaning to them. Sign up for a free account, and you can start building and sharing personalized maps, complete with place markers, tags and descriptions of each spot. Collaborate on them with your buddies, or keep them to yourself.

Browsing Platial’s tags is like leafing through an atlas written by poets. A user going by the moniker “Anselm” labels the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with the heading “childhood years spent here starving to death.” In his description of this riverside town on the Canadian prairie, he talks about how his mother “hooked up” with a bunch of broke hippies there. They had no money for food. “One time our cat had kittens and the kittens started disappearing one by one — the dog was eating them,” he writes.

You might say Platial is a cross between MapQuest and LiveJournal. Built on the open interfaces for Google Maps, the 2-month-old site is one of a new breed of map mashups — web applications created by mixing an already-existing open mapping platform with original software.

Platial co-creator Di-Ann Eisnor says she built Platial for what she calls “neogeographers,” who use digital maps to tell stories and chart eccentric routes through familiar terrain.

I love the wild and different ways to approach terrain I have walked over, like the street food map of New York, or the vegan perspective of San Francisco. But the truly personal and introspective neogeographers and the ones doing the most interesting stuff. Like Tracy the Astonishing’s Big Box Reuse map that details how former strip mall stores are being repurposed as churches, go cart tracks, libraries, and head start centers.

The best tools are those that allow us to simultaneously see the world and place ourselves in it. That is what Platial and other neogeographic tools are letting us do.