Nestoria Interview – Andrei Taraschuk from UMapper
Another interesting lead to come out of Where 2.0 was the suggestion to 'have a poke around UMapper'. Which resulted in the following interview with UMapper's CEO Andrei Taraschuk:
What was the idea behind UMapper and what kind of projects are you working on at the moment?
Currently there are a ton of mapping tools and APIs, but most of them are geared towards developers. With UMapper we wanted to build a tool that anyone could use to create, distribute, track and monetize online maps. In addition, we wanted to simplify the process of map data licensing and usage. With UMapper anyone can make an interactive map within minutes without worrying about licensing, development etc.
Right now we have two priorities – make UMapper maps available on all mobile platforms, and add additional real time data sets like traffic, weather, social (Twitter) etc.. Since our technology relies heavily on Flash it is a challenge (but still doable) to port it to IPhone and similar devices. Also, the mobile market is very fragmented, so covering all available platforms requires quite a bit of development.
As for additional data sets, we see maps as a universal interface for displaying any kind of data. Currently we have integrated weather and Twitter overlays into UMapper, and both are quite successful. We plan to expand this offering to traffic, census and other data sets.
There are all sorts of interesting ideas coming out of the convergence of mapping and technology, what are some of the ones that you've spotted that have impressed you?
The most impressive project I've seen lately is indiemapper.com which combines great functionality with an intuitive user interface. They have certainly raised the bar for everyone else in the industry. A few other projects to keep an eye on are GeoCommon's Maker and UniversalMind's Spatial Key, both of which are impressive.
And what kind of ideas are you getting excited about that might result in even more interesting applications in the future?
There isn't been a shortage of innovation. New technologies and start-ups in the location space are popping up almost daily. Interestingly enough, there hasn't been much progress on the monetization front. What we haven't done well is figure out how to monetize those technologies and make them sustainable. Location-based advertisement has been a hot topic for quite some time but it is yet to deliver promised results. That said, I am excited to see the LBS market mature and new business models take hold. Perhaps sometime next year we will figure out how to make money.
Do you have any ideas for new products that you'd love to see but that technology hasn't quite made possible yet?
Sometime I think that it would be great to have a global time line of geographically referenced events so a user can zero-in on a specific spot, drag the time line and discover what happened in a place before and what's going on currently. Not sure if technology is the limiting factor as much as finding a business model and scalability. In any case, I personally would use it, and it would be a great addition to Wikipedia.
That is a very cool idea! I'd definitely use something like that.
You were recently at the Where 2.0 conference – did you hear anything there that you got particularly excited about?
IMO, the most interesting development in the mapping space is the wider adoption of OpenStreetMap (OSM). In particular, the use of OSM in crisis mapping. It is great to see collaboration between commercial satellite/data companies, governments and OSM volunteers in aiding relief workers on the ground. I also wrote some thoughts on Where 2.0 in my blog.
And finally do you do anything map-geeky in your spare time that you'd like to confess to us?
I am an avid supporter of OpenStreetMap and try to contribute to the project whenever I get a chance. Not sure if that can be considered Geeky since OpenStreetMap is entering the main stream these days. Also, whenever I read a book or watch a movie, I constantly look things up on a map.
I agree – I don't think that's particularly geeky at all. Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts and ideas with us.More about Andrei from AndreiI am originally from Russia and moved to the States in 1999 to pursue an interactive media degree at the Art Institute of Colorado. Before starting my first company, AFComponents, I worked in a number of great companies, the most notable of which was a Asaca-Shibasoku where I worked on experimental Flash-based touch screen interfaces. As far as I know, we were the first to adopt Flash on Linux on a commercially large scale.I started AFComponents in 2005. The business model was quite simple: we developed Flash Components and sold them online. The project quickly grew to become one of the biggest flash-component communities at that time.
One of our experimental projects under AFComponents was GMap – a Flash mapping API that utilized map data from Google Maps. The project was completely open-sourced and gained significant traction before being acquired by Google in 2007 and becoming Google Map's Flash API. After the work with Google was done, we decided to pursue opportunities in the interactive mapping space and started working on UMap and UMapper.
In 2007 I also co-founded a company called with VideoBloom with Antoine Toffa. I worked as a technical lead up until January 2010. VideoBloom is a growing company and you can learn more at www.videobloom.com
