The GeoStack Geodata In the world of geographic information, the value has long belonged to those companies that control the underlying data. Tele Atlas http://teleatlas.com and NAVTEq http://navteq.com are the dominant compa- nies in this field and are responsible for much of the consumer-grade data used for navigation devices and electronic maps. (Look at the fine-print copyright infor- mation at the bottom of popular web mapping sites and you are likely to find one or the other.) There are similar large data vendors of remote, or satellite, imagery, such as Digital Globe http://digitalglobe.com and GeoEye http://geoeye.com, and a variety of other infrastructure, business, and sensor information suppliers. Tele Atlas and NAVTEq are growing fast. Both are public companies--NAVTEq is listed on the NYSE; Tele Atlas is listed on the Frankfurt and Euronext exchanges.* While Tele Atlas reported positive Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) only over the last year, NAVTEq averaged $142M in EBIT over the last five years, and grew an average of 37 percent annually in that time. The value of geodata became more apparent when both companies were put in play last year, Nokia acquired NAVTEq for $8.1 billion and TomTom acquired Tele Atlas for $4.3 billion. This concept of a stack of services has a clear paral- lel in the non-geo world. Consider how the blogging ecosystem works. Blogger, WordPress, and many other similar tools let individuals create and post content on the Web with relative ease. FeedBurner provides additional value by hosting and analyzing blog feeds. Technorati aggregates these feeds and provides filtering and search. NetNewsWire, Google Reader, and many others make it easy to read and manage these aggregated feeds. Industry and community standards hold together the layers of the blogging stack. Because every blog is written in HTML, the basic language of web pages, and distributed through RSS or Atom, the common formats for creating blog feeds, vendors can build toolsets that work in a wide variety of clients: web browsers, mobile phones, even desktop applications. Where 2.0 has similar protocols: KML (Keyhole Markup Language, named after the company that developed what is now Google Earth) and GeoRSS are two of the most common that are being used by online services. These open standards let businesses read- ily integrate their offerings into existing consumer services and devices, lowering barriers to entry and risk while increasing overall value. This model--individual com- ponents leveraging other systems to provide additional value--is the key to Where 2.0. This report explains the details and opportunities for each of these components. * Earnings are reported differently for each company as they operate in different countries and report in different currencies: NAvTEq in dollars and Tele Atlas in euros. Both report Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT), though, so for consistency we focus on those numbers: EBIT = Operating Revenue ­ Operating Expenses + Non-operating Income For Tele Atlas, we used the average exchange rate for each year to convert the reported EBIT from euros to dollars. 3 : Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web Report 2008