The Hyperlocal Content Opportunity
So I noticed a few month back where Nokia had acquired MetaCarta and I just finally had a chance to try to have a look and figure out what that was all about. After 10 minutes of digging, I am walking away with the conclusion that they basically have a way to search through natural language documents (ie a bunch of words) discover and recognize location oriented references (“hey guys I am in Newton”) and then apply a geo-tag to them to provide a new dimension and layer in which to organize and discover new information and patterns.
It seems that the folk that have found this most useful so far are governments and energy companies. According to the Metacarta site, there are millions of government documents of which over 70% contain significant geographic references. Read more
