Good week for my former Partners at RVC: after the acquisition of Moreover Technologies by Verisign (that was officialized yesterday), Yahoo has announced the acquisition of UK-based Whereonearth.
We (RVC, the managers of the Reuters Greenhouse Fund) had invested in the company back in January 2000. I remember my first visit to their London office, where a large number of GIS (as in Geographic Information Systems) experts were producing and/or aggregating multi-layered maps of the world. Each layer (representing contours of the land, countries, counties, zip codes, roads, rail tracks, etc.) could be independently overlayed in a very impressive way. They also had an extensive database of locations expressed in different languages, with distances. Using these assets, they had developed a number of location-based solutions.
The Yahoo Search Blog actually carried the announcement:
Whereonearth’s very talented team of software engineers and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) experts have worked hard to develop sophisticated technology that contains a unique combination of global data and software algorithms that make local search possible. Together, we’ll be able to provide the most geo-relevant information across all of Yahoo!’s products and services.
The corresponding Reuters piece from is here.
Congratulations to Dev Patel and his team.
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