It was a good day at FortiusOne to be able to announce the close of our VC round. We’ve been working on it for a while and it is definitely a combination of relief and excitement to have it done. It is always a learning experience and we are thrilled to have In-Q-tel and Chart Ventures as partners. Both firms have great experience in the space and In-Q-tel’s success with Keyhole (now Google Earth) and @Last (Google Sketch Up) is a great benefit and nice compliment to our efforts.

We think the round will provide a solid foundation, for our admittedly lofty goal, of interconnecting and sharing the world’s geographic data. We’ve been digging up and organizing open source geographic data for a long time and have always been amazed at what we can find. Sometimes that has gotten us in trouble (at least the media’s perception of it) and others times has been a big help in crises like the London Bombings and Hurricane Katrina. What we learned through all our work with the wild world of geographic data is that it is horribly unorganized, difficult to find, and even harder to work with.

Google Earth did a great job allowing people to see the planet they live on and view places they had never been - raising awareness and becoming hugely popular in the process. We’d like to now tell the story behind the satellite imagery. Our goal is to reveal and share all the data that tells the story about a location. What are the demographics, politics, environment, health, infrastructure, neighborhoods, education, and of course best bars for any place on the planet. We believe this data should not be any harder to find than a local search query for “dry cleaners”.

We have a big chunk of data to start it off and are working like mad to make it bigger every day. The real success though will be connecting with the community of geographic data across the world. The value proposition is simple. Everything in GeoCommons is free to upload and free to download as long as it is shared with the community. When you upload data you immediately have the ability to combine that data with 35,000 other data variables. You put one piece of information in and get the network effect of being able to combine that with thousands of other data sets to discover something new. We’ll provide tools to let you easily consume the data and share your mashups so everyone can tell the story behind the satellite imagery. At the end of the day it is all about moving past push pins.

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