Greg Sadetsky

CEO of Poly9, startup based in quebec city. Been doing custom mapping applications for 3 years. Flagship product is FreeEarth. 3D web globe. Round ball, you can see earth, can zoom, tilt, see terrain and high resolution imagery.

FreeEarth lives on the web, integral part of the web. Makes a huge difference. Being part of the browser means you don’t have to download, install anything. The version of the .net framework doesn’t matter. Uses Flex/Flash. If YouTube works, FreeEarth works. We should not be asking users to install/download stuff.

Entertaining uses of FreeEarth:

  • Skype Nomad using Freeearth.
  • Sanyo Japan - users can leave messages of well-being to the globe.
  • Wild Sanctuary - one year ago, Where 2.0 2007, web design company in san francisco were introducing interactive mapping application of sound-scapes for wild sanctuary. You could click on a region and hear wht it sounded like. Although they had no problem with the 3D version with google maps, they had difficulty with the google earth version because people had to download and install it or couldn’t install due to corporate security products. 30earth realised that using google earth loses your users to google earth, no longer on the site. They cam to us and we helped them in 2 days for a BBC interview.

We’ve seen why web deployment means so much. We put out a press release yesterday about a joint venture with another canadian company to launch “GeoAlert”. System to save lives. GeoAlert is all about saving lives.

Every time an oil company wants to pump oil from a well, they have to go to the government and ask permission. Energy commission looks them in the eye and says “are you sure you can call everyone around the well if something happens?” Energy board looks them back in the eye and says “no problem”, which is, in effect, false. The oil companies do 3 things, go out to all residents with paper forms, take contact information, children, medical information. Put the info into excel file, database. Then they really hope nothing happens.

There’s no organized way of reaching people, tracking who didn’t get the information, have to lookup in the excel file. No audit trail. Very scarey. GeoAlert does two things very well. 1st lets the commission click on a 3D map, FreeEarth map, to locate the incident and 2nd thing is call everyone around that well. GeoAlert will take into account the wind and call people directly in the gas plume first. Isn’t that amazing? … (one guy says “Yes”)

mapmkr - Launching Summer ‘08

“How do I see my data, on a map?” Do we have to go to see specialists just to write text documents? No, so why do we have to for maps? Making a service to allow this. Hoping that people at Where 2.0 will use this.

Katamari Damacy

Technorati tags: geoalert, mapmakr, map, poly9, where, where2.0, where2008