MetaCarta

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MetaCarta
Company typePrivate
IndustrySoftware
Founded1999; 27 years ago (1999) in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Founders
FateAcquired in 2010 by Nokia who licensed the product and brand to Finch
Headquarters
Reston, Virginia
,
USA
Key people
Products
Websitewww.metacarta.com

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]

History

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Financing

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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.[22][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.[23][24] In July 2001, they received $500,000 from DARPA’s Next Generation Internet Program.[25][26][27] In 2001 and 2002, angel investors, including Esther Dyson, Bob Frankston, David P. Reed and Pattie Maes invested.[24][28][29][30][31]

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][32] In-Q-Tel invested a second time in 2004.[33]

In December 2003, the company raised a $6.5M Series B from a syndicate led by Sevin Rosen.[34] Sevin Rosen espoused an investment philosophy of frugality but required a controlling interest,[35] and the decision to accept that investment has become the subject of a business school case study.[24] Sevin Rosen’s cofounder Ben Rosen has historical ties to Esther Dyson,[36] and had invested in Bob Frankston’s company VisiCorp in the late 1970s. The syndicate included the venture capital arm of Chevron Texaco.[34][37] In 2005, the company raised a Series C of $10 million led by FA Tech.[38][39][40] Between 2006 and 2009, one member of the Series B syndicate went into receivership[41] and the syndicate’s lead investor Sevin Rosen had an internal schism that eventually led it to split up.[42] This forced the Sevin Rosen leader for the MetaCarta deal to depart.[43][44]

Oil & Gas

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In 2007, the company launched a product for the energy sector in partnership with IHS,[45][46] and Schlumberger acquired exclusive distribution rights in the petroleum industry.[13][47][15] The company partnered with content providers like the Society of Petroleum Engineers to support upstream exploration use cases.[48][49]


Acquisition

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Nokia acquired MetaCarta on April 9, 2010,[50] a few months after the company reported record revenue growth.[51] 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.[52] In 2012, John Frank left the role of Chief Architect for Search at Nokia to found Diffeo.[53] 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.[54][55][56][57] Qbase re-launched MetaCarta as part of Synthos Technologies, now Finch, naming Erin-Michael Gill, CEO in September 2014.[58]

Products and services

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MetaCarta offers multiple products based on its georeferencing and geoindexing technology, called CartaTrees.[59][60] 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).[61][62] 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][63] For oil & gas customers, the GTS was branded as "geOdrive".[45][64]

The company also offered Internet-based services built on its technology, including map displays of news stories filtered by location.[65] Microsoft Vine,[66] National Geographic,[67][68][69] and other publishers[16] have used these services.

The company's georeferencing or geoparsing engine includes gazetteer databases of millions of place names[70] in special knowledge domains, such as petroleum,[48] and languages, including English, Arabic, and Spanish.[71][72][73] The system uses machine learning to disambiguate the semantics of mentions of places in natural language text.[74]

MetaCarta Labs

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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,[75][76][77][78] including Gutenkarte.org,[79] TileCache, FeatureServer, and OpenLayers, now a project in Open Source Geospatial Foundation. MetaCarta Labs also showcased integrations[80] with Silverlight, SharePoint, Flickr, Firefox, and a map rectifier.[81][82][83][84] 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)[85]

Awards

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See also

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References

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