The O’Reilly Radar, that is…

Brady offers a good overview of the latest & greatest in the geo-portal data wars. Of particular interest are his comments about owning the geostack:

Until recently, Yahoo! used deCarta to handle creating directions (or routing). They have announced that they have taken ownership of this part of the stack and have built their own routing engine. Ask and Google still use deCarta. Microsoft has always had their own. Yahoo! is hoping to make their new engine a differentiator. In some ways this is analogous to Microsoft’s purchase of Vexcel, a 3D imagery provider. Microsoft did not want the same 3D data as Google Earth or any other search engine for its 3D world.

I think that any vendor servicing Google, Microsoft, Ask, Yahoo or MapQuest will have to keep an eye on their next source of revenue. Those contracts aren’t going to necessarily last too long. The geostack is too valuable to outsource.

There is only one part of the stack that I think might be to expensive for any one of the engines to buy or build out right. That’s the street data and it’s a data source primarily supplied by two companies, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. NAVTEQ has a market cap of 3.5 bilion dollars as of this writing; Tela Atlas has one of 1.4 billion pounds. These would be spendy purchases. Microsoft is currently working closely with Facet Technology Corporation to collect street data for cities to add a street-level 3D layer (see Facet’s SightMap for a preview), but this Facet is not collecting data to match the other players. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo! parleys its partnership with OpenStreetMap into a data play.

[Brady’s spellchecker appears stuck in the ‘off’ position.]