Tim and I met with a large mapping company the week after Where 2.0 last year, and this was one of the ideas I threw out then about where there might be money in the mashups. The idea is that Google does your advertising for you, creating this huge interest in maps and by their licensing terms creating a demand for differently-branded reliable versions of the embeddable map component. Then you come along and meet that need. This company, like other established players in the mapping field, already offers enterprise-level APIs, so it’d just be a matter of offering a clone of the Google gizmos. They didn’t take us up on the idea, but now I see someone else had the same idea: PlaceBase is a GIS and mapping company offering an API based on the Google Maps API, but with enterprise-grade Service Level Agreements. (Via Programmable Web)
