Big change is coming to the GIS/Geospatial industry. Walk through the crowded halls of any of the GIS, GeoWeb, or Gov 2.0 conferences around the country right now and you will see it. There is a groundswell of innovation occurring, and the traditional GIS/Geospatial establishment is caught in a whirlwind of new technology, new entrants, and fresh thinking that is creating the most disruptive and exciting time in the industry in the last 20 years. Fasten your seat belts; the pace of this change is about to accelerate, and the “creative destruction” that will transpire over the next five years will likely reshape an entire industry.
At Chart Venture Partners, this is exactly the type of market dynamic in which we seek to invest. It doesn’t take much to see the writing on the wall. Only five years ago, the GIS industry was the province of a small group of vendors selling proprietary software and data services, largely walled off from the Internet, and enjoying a virtual lock on the market. Utilization of GIS technology was a one-way street, with small numbers of GIS professionals producing all of the information for dissemination. Expensive and complex software, restrictive licensing, and inaccessible data silos prevented any broad-scale utilization or data sharing, and terms like neogeography, slippy maps, open standards, and social software weren’t yet part of the geo-vernacular.
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