October 18, 2007

Social Mapping: Game Not Over Yet

Michael Arrington

15 comments »

As Google expands their social mapping features, competitors are regrouping and refocusing. Kleiner Perkins backed Platial, headquartered in Portland, is announcing the acquisition of chief competitor Frappr this morning. Frappr co-founder Kun Gao will join Platial as part of the deal.

Platial CEO Di-Ann Eisnor says the combined companies will reach 15 million unique users per month and will store 100 million user-generated location-based points of data, including photos, videos, reviews, stories and people (see examples here and here). 25% of all distributed map widgets on the Internet will be served via the platform.

Frappr never took outside financing. Platial raised two rounds. They took $800,000 in angel funding in October 2005 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Omidyar Network, Ram Shriram, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon, and Ron Conway. In February 2007 they raised an additional $2.6 million from Keynote Ventures, with participation from most of the previous investors.

Sphere It

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October 22nd, 2007 at 3:03 am

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Steve Ballmer

October 18th, 2007 at 6:18 am

Harvest my wisdom while you can;
Agree with me and take a stand.
Tyrants true do not explore;
Things they did not know before.
Hear my voice and heed it mista,
Leave the Mac, go with Vista.

FSB 2007
(selected verses from “Clear Vista”)
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Just trying to see who has culture.
US Web Hosting

October 18th, 2007 at 6:49 am

I like the mapping feature in frapper, why it is still in Beta?
Lars Teigen

October 18th, 2007 at 6:56 am

There seems to be a small spelling error: leiner should probably be Kleiner in the last paragraph.
deisnor

October 18th, 2007 at 7:11 am

Thanks! Just want to note that Kun joins the advisory board. He also has a new exciting thing going on.
Andres

October 18th, 2007 at 7:27 am

Awesome. Congratulations to Di-Ann and the rest of the team. Go Portland startups!
Just a friend

October 18th, 2007 at 8:51 am

One interesting part of the story that’s left out: I believe Frappr was already acquired once by Slide. Early on in Slide’s history they acquired the Frappr guys maybe for the traffic or maybe for the engineering talent. Either way, supposedly the team never integrated properly and it’s no surprise that they’re not off to Platial.
John Maloney

October 18th, 2007 at 9:07 am

Congrats, Di-Ann - exciting to see Platial grow/expand.
Tom

October 18th, 2007 at 10:19 am

http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv shows a lousy 230k uniques/month… how do these companies come up with ‘15M unique users’?
Rajan Tawate

October 18th, 2007 at 10:50 am

Man.. are the names really funny…or is it me..
Gavin P. Quinn

October 18th, 2007 at 12:06 pm

I still like http://www.grapheety.com better. Faster interface, better looking. Can do comments and ratings. Not so much junk…
manfmnantucket

October 18th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

Tom you have a good point there - did anyone doublecheck this data??

25% of all mapping data on the web - and platial.com isn’t even in the alexa top 100K?? I mean I know alexa numbers can be fudged but you’d think if they had THAT much traffic they would be in the non-obscure alexa category…
DataPoint

October 18th, 2007 at 4:00 pm

Something is definitely a tad fishy with the data. Just last month, Eisnor is cited in this article as saying that Platial has 5M uniques per month(still sounds like alot!):
http://www.law.com/jsp/legalte.....9760573411
manfmnantucket

October 18th, 2007 at 8:13 pm

15M uniques per month is nothing if those are all widget views… I always thought Platial was somebody’s hobby site it’s surprising to see they got all this funding. Not to be too critical though… I can see where it might be a good buy for Platial - they definitely need some help with graphics and user experience stuff, and the Frappr map widgets are nicely designed and look slick. A second look at the traffic reveals that it is frappr which has the traffic - well not in the alexa top 10K but at least in the top 100K.

So what’s the plan for monetizing map widgets on myspace?

Has anybody besides Frappr figured out how to put genuine google maps into myspace widgets?

Couldn’t google squish this like a gnat by simply offering a truly embeddable (ie myspace and wordpress) map widget, and then
monetizing it via their ad partnership with myspace?
Pankaj K Garg

November 3rd, 2007 at 10:26 pm

In answer to the last post, we offer a service ZeeMaps (http://www.zeemaps.com) that lets you embed a map widget in MySpace or WordPress through a Flash movie.