Geofabrik wins the Best Elevator Pitch Award SOTM10

As we announced last week, Nestoria sponsored the Elevator Pitch on the Business Day in Girona. Nestoria is a familiar name among the crowd involved in the OSM project. In fact I had the chance to ask on stage if you ever heard of 'Nestoria, a property search engine' and more than half of the audience raised their hands.

A panel discussion preceded the elevator pitch sponsored by Nestoria. Chaired flaboyantly by Steve Feldman, the panel was a quick conversation about "business models in turbulent times". The panel itself composed by Christian O. Petersen and Roger Muller (CloudMade), Randy Meech (AOL Local), Robert Soden (Development seed) and Matthew Quinlan (Bing Maps).

Elevator pitch

If the frantic tempo of the panel was not fast enough, five candidates to the best Elevator Pitch award lined up on stage to present their businesses. They had 60 seconds to articulate a coherent and clear pitch of their business. Panellists and audience had the chance to ask a couple of questions to each candidate.

I took a few notes that I transcribe here, in order of appearance of the candidates:

Raphael Volz Nogago. Build mobile informations systems. Cross-platfrom products that work online and offline and structure data so apps can work on devices for up to 2 days. Custom solutions for companies with core technologies. It provides B2C services for instance leisure navigation for smartphones.

Jaak Laineste Nutiteq. Mobile mapping tools kits for mobile java (maps SDK, guides, services). Nogago and CloudMade are customers. Licensing to developers and turn-key projects. Careful not to compite with customers

Jonathan Harley Spiffymap.  Provide customized dynamic maps to web developers at a fraction of the cost because "Contact us" pages are usually left unbranded and undesigned. Will reflect upon investment in advertising when in launches.

Felix Lamouroux Offmaps. Licensing online library developped specifically to render OSM maps on iPhone and iPads maps. Its compliance to for Apple standards are superior to cross-platform solutions which can only provide the minimum denominator user experience. Licensing not free for download saves hosting cost because it compresses tiles as much as 10 times in MB (a map of a city is only 40 MB big)

Frederic Ramm Geofabrik. Old fashioned (in Frederic's own words) services based model. It saves time to companies. Free consulting as PR among insiders in the industry that refer them to 3rd party companies. It admittedly scales poorly

and the winner is...

Geofabrik was voted and acclaimed as the Best Elevator Pitch. Voters appreciated the straightforward business proposition: "pay me money to save to a lot of time". Frederic delivered an impressive and honest pitch and this was reflected on the poll count.

 

 

The runner up was Offmaps, represented by Felix Lamouroux. What we learnt as sponsors is that clarity in a business presentation is a good starter and a tangible and intuitive proposal of added value is a real winner.

Despite the lack of sleep and the intense heat we enjoyed joining the diverse community of the Open Street Map. Congrats from here to Felix and Frederic for their contribution!

 

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