nearmap ditches nokia maps to go with google

Nearmap ditches Nokia Maps to go with Google - Financial Review

19 Dec 2013 05


ASX-listed online geospatial mapping company Nearmap has ditched Nokia’s mapping software and signed a new licence agreement to incorporate Google Maps into its products.

The company, which has a market cap of more than $155 million, will add features of Google Maps to its existing portfolio of offerings, which are based on regularly updated high-resolution photographs of urban areas across the country.

While users of Google Earth have become accustomed to seeing satellite images, Nearmap photos offer subscribers the ability to zoom in to great detail and is updated monthly, meaning changing conditions can be monitored.

The company’s managing director, Simon Crowther, said its decision to ditch Nokia and go with Google was not due to failings of the Nokia product or concerns about the future of the company, rather he said the Google platform was more useful for Nearmap’s customers.

He said the company would now “re-skin” Google Maps to incorporate it into its own products.

“At the end of the day Google has a solid, very reliable mapping engine, which will essentially power the front end of our whole product and all the features that people are used to getting from Google can be added,” Mr Crowther siad.

“While we were previously using Nokia’s mapping data, we decided that Google offers a much more comprehensive solution.”

He said many people in the market expected the company to be rivals with Google, but said this was a misconception. It sells its services to larger organisations like power providers, as well as small and medium sized operators.

He said real estate was a lucrative market, with investors keen to get up-to-date imagery of an area before investing in property. The solar industry is also a major customer, as providers can use the high resolution pictures to inspect roofs to plan installations, without needing to send workers out to visit the site.

Mr Crowther said the company had no intentions of photographing the whole of Australia, his photographic flights are targeted at higher population areas for commercial reasons. He said Nearmap now had recent high-res imagery of areas inhabityed by 85 per cent of the Australian population.

“People comparing us to Google is helpful in some ways as it is a yardstick everyone knows about, but it is misleading in the sense that they are not in the same business as we are. In most markets Google hasn’t updated its satellite imagery for quite a few years,” Mr Crowther said.

He said the new licensing agreement with Google was a significant step for the business as it would allow the company to integrate more data layers on to its maps. He said the long-term future of the business would place a greater focus on selling data rich products to compliment the imagery


http://www.afr.com/p/technology/nearmap_ditches_nokia_maps_to_go_JIrqBWPn8YNmyEVjtbMTCJ