Type | Private |
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Industry | Software |
Founded | 1999Cambridge, Massachusetts | in
Founders |
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Fate | Acquired in 2010 by Nokia who licensed the product and brand to Finch |
Headquarters | , USA |
Key people |
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Products | |
Website | www |
MetaCarta is a software company that developed one of the first search engines to use a map to find unstructured documents. [1] [2] [3] [4] The product uses natural language processing to georeference text [5] for customers in defense, [6] [7] intelligence, [8] [9] homeland security, [10] [11] law enforcement, [12] oil and gas companies, [13] [14] [15] and publishing. [16] [17] The company was founded in 1999 and was acquired by Nokia in 2010. [18] [19] Nokia subsequently spun out the enterprise products division and the MetaCarta brand to Qbase, now renamed to Finch. [20] [21]
MetaCarta was founded in 1999 by John R. Frank while he was working on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [25] [1] By early 2001, John and Erik Rauch had developed a prototype of the Geographic Text Search product and incorporated the company together with Doug Brenhouse. [26] [27] In July 2001, they received $500,000 from DARPA’s Next Generation Internet Program. [28] [29] [30] In 2001 and 2002, angel investors, including Esther Dyson, Bob Frankston, David P. Reed and Pattie Maes invested. [27] [31] [32] [33] [34]
In October 2002, CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel invested and Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, said "there is tremendous interest and value in this type of geospatial information service and MetaCarta is the first company in this space in which we have invested." [8] [35] In-Q-Tel invested a second time in 2004. [36]
In December 2003, the company raised a $6.5M Series B from a syndicate led by Sevin Rosen. [37] Sevin Rosen espoused an investment philosophy of frugality but required a controlling interest, [38] and the decision to accept that investment has become the subject of a business school case study. [27] Sevin Rosen’s cofounder Ben Rosen has historical ties to Esther Dyson, [39] and had invested in Bob Frankston’s company VisiCorp in the late 1970s. The syndicate included the venture capital arm of Chevron Texaco. [37] [40] In 2005, the company raised a Series C of $10 million led by FA Tech. [41] [42] [43] Between 2006 and 2009, one member of the Series B syndicate went into receivership [44] and the syndicate’s lead investor Sevin Rosen had an internal schism that eventually led it to split up. [45] This forced the Sevin Rosen leader for the MetaCarta deal to depart. [46] [47]
In 2007, the company launched a product for the energy sector in partnership with IHS, [48] [49] and Schlumberger acquired exclusive distribution rights in the petroleum industry. [13] [50] [15] The company partnered with content providers like the Society of Petroleum Engineers to support upstream exploration use cases. [51] [52]
Nokia acquired MetaCarta on April 9, 2010, [53] a few months after the company reported record revenue growth. [54] Nokia kept MetaCarta's core engineering team to build the search engine behind its HERE.com location search offering, and spun-out the enterprise products division and MetaCarta brand to Qbase Holdings in July, 2010. [55] In 2012, John Frank left the role of Chief Architect for Search at Nokia to found Diffeo. [56] Don Zereski, the CEO of MetaCarta at the time of its acquisition by Nokia became VP of Search and Discovery at HERE and led acquisitions of other startups. [57] [58] [59] [60]
MetaCarta offers multiple products based on its georeferencing and geoindexing technology, called CartaTrees. [61] [62] Its first product was an enterprise search tool that allowed users to combine keyword and map-based filters to retrieve documents. It was called Geographic Text Search (GTS) and was later renamed to Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP). [63] [64] The GTS was packaged as server appliance and used by enterprise customers that often cannot use cloud services, such as the British Transport Police for the 2012 Olympics. [12] [22] For oil & gas customers, the GTS was branded as "geOdrive". [48] [65]
The company also offered Internet-based services built on its technology, including map displays of news stories filtered by location. [66] Microsoft Vine, [67] National Geographic, [68] [69] [70] and other publishers [16] have used these services.
The company's georeferencing or geoparsing engine includes gazetteer databases of millions of place names [71] in special knowledge domains, such as petroleum, [51] and languages, including English, Arabic, and Spanish. [72] [73] [74] The system uses machine learning to disambiguate the semantics of mentions of places in natural language text. [75]
In addition to its commercial products, its lab website labs.metacarta.com launched a number of geoweb, neogeography, and open source software projects that gained notoriety through O'Reilly’s Where 2.0 conferences, [76] [77] [78] [79] including Gutenkarte.org, [80] TileCache, FeatureServer, and OpenLayers, now a project in Open Source Geospatial Foundation. MetaCarta Labs also showcased integrations [81] with Silverlight, SharePoint, Flickr, Firefox, and a map rectifier. [82] [83] [84] [85] Shortly before being acquired, MetaCarta granted the source code for its enterprise content crawler to the Apache Foundation to create the Apache Manifold Connector Framework (ManifoldCF) [86]
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21 Feb 2005 Red Herring -- The Tyranny of Location - 01 Feb 2005 Press Release: MetaCarta Named a Top 100 Innovator by Red Herring