Three members of Platial; Di-Ann Eisnor, Chris Goad and Anselm Hook have initiated a large scale effort to look at the world from the perspective of Citizens. By enabling users anywhere to annotate Places and create maps, shifts in connection and territory also shift. In addition to contributing users can share, enhance existing data, find relevant places and discover things like “similar places” which connect Places through folksonomy.

Platial was founded in June 2005 to create a world-wide collaborative atlas that bridges people, neighborhoods and nations and enables people to document experience through geography. Our consumer beta rolled out softly on December 13 with 100,000 tagged locations and the beginning of a Platform for adding, storing, sharing Places and creating custom maps. Platial has just scratched the surface on aggregating place data from users and content providers and publishing that data in various forms throughout the web, in newspapers, on mobile devices and to urban planners and academics.

Initial Platial Partners include; Canwest who will highlight our maps in their newspapers and will launch our first co-branded site and ESRI, the premier provider of mapping data with over 1,000,000 users and 100,000 customers. Additionally, we have deals with multiple grassroots place databases for new parents, outdoor enthusiasts, travelers, vegetarians, fair trade retailers, venues and many more.

Platial is currently a team of seven place-adoring engineers, PhDs, entrepreneurs and user advocates based in Portland, OR and recently closed an angel round of funding from top tier investors; Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Omidyar Network, William R. Hearst III, Sherpalo Ventures, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon and Jerry Neumman. Platial will generate revenue in a number of ways including cost-per click advertising, local community board with advertiser listings and content licensing.

Di-Ann Eisnor, Founder/CEO. Di-Ann is an entrepreneur obsessed with urban exploration. Platial is Di-Ann’s third start-up; Eisnor Interactive created alternative media opportunities for digital businesses and became part of the Omnicom Group in 2000 with a team of 60, 3 offices and $15MM in annual revenue, Community-centric Marketing was started from Amsterdam to help businesses like American Express, The Metropolitan Opera and countless community groups create collaborative campaigns fueled by social software. Platial began as a CCM initiative- CCM is now part of a Ketchum PR spin-off. She also co-invented the urban exploration/psychogeography game Here.

Di-Ann has been called the godmother of guerrilla marketing by Fast Company because for 10 years her work has taken her to the street gathering insights, feedback and forging relationships. She lectures on urban mapping and pervasive gaming and has spoken at dozens of conferences. She has been featured in Fast Company, NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, AdWeek, Bloomberg Television, PBS and CNN. She has been on the covers of Fortune Small Business and Working Woman Magazine. Di-Ann has worked with fortune 500s and start-ups in Europe and the US including Polaroid, CNet, About, Napster, TheStreet, Yahoo!, NYTimes, American Express, Duracell, Lipton Recipe Secrets and Campina. She was also Director of Client Services at SiteSpecific and spent four years at Dentsu in the US and Europe and has a BS in Painting and Business from NYU.

Chris Goad, Chief Architect. Chris Goad is leading our course from early Platform to meaningful Place annotation and advanced GIS tools made incredibly simple for users, Chris Goad is a computer scientist by training (PhD Stanford, 1980). He worked as a research associate at Stanford from 1980 to 1983, and co-founded two companies: Silma in 1993 and Inflorescence in 1993. (Inflorescence changed direction and name in 2000; Map Bureau is its current name). Chris’s areas of work have included applications of mathematical logic to computation, computer vision, simulation software for 3D mechanical systems, programming language design, and the semantic web. During the last four years, he has concentrated on applications of semantic web technology to cartography, and on the design and implementation of Fabl, a programming language that represents programs as semantic web objects. Chris lives in Astoria, Oregon. See ttp://fabl.net/chrisgoad.

Anselm Hook, Technical Director. Anselm was a games technical lead for 15 years for many companies including Electronic Arts and a two year stint as CTO of Virtual Games Inc; a specialized 12 person games company building location based entertainment systems. Games development tends to have many extremes; it can be at times intensely creative with serious technical challenges and at other times simply a long drawn-out effort to remove defects and cross the finish line. Each production starts with a lot of unknowns; the people, the technology, the risks – even the market. Yet in an industry that is known for failure; most everything he has done has shipped, shipped on time, and done well. One of Anselm’s strengths is the experience and discipline to be able to steward a project through the very different stages of its existence; from concept, through implementation to closing and gold masters. Anselm also participated in a number of geo projects including:

CivicMaps. See http://maps.civicactions.net and http://civicmaps.org. A free BSD licensed clone of the entire google maps application stack – from managing geographic vector data to presenting that data as draggable map on the web. By combining this with Civicspace CMS this was able to offer a completely free way for people to geotag their favorite places and view them on a map. The goal was to ‘turn on a million lights’ in a sense; providing maps is a difficult but necessary adjunct to the real goal which is to make it as easy to blog about place as it is to sms a friend. The http://www.openstreetmap.org project uses this work.

Thingster. See: http://thingster.org/about, http://www.p2pmap.org and http://headmap.org. With Ben Russell. Possibly the first social place knowledge sharing service. The primary value here was in helping to foster a community of enthusiasts around the principles of Locative [Karlis Kalnins] media. This movement continues at http://locative.net and http://locative.us and many of us still camp out on irc at #geo irc.oftc.net. This work was informed by Jo Walsh and Dan Brickley who encouraged an RDF based core and this work may also be the first RDF based content management system. This was shown at ETECH, FooCamp, Planetwork and other events and had coverage in The Economist, The Guardian and The New York Times.