Mapping the way to new age of reporting

Orest Pilskalns, a professor at Washington State University Vancouver, background, helped create MapWith.Us, an interactive mapping tool for computer and portable users, with fellow investor Kevin Karpenske. (Files/The Columbian)

The Columbian Mapwith.us on Columbian web site

When social networkers didn’t flee MySpace and Facebook to go ape over GeoMonkey’s automated mapmaking software two years ago, a local team of computer programmers didn’t hide up a tree.

Instead, the company born in a Washington State University Vancouver classroom is no longer monkeying around with just trying to put themselves on the social networking map. After changing its public persona to MapWith.Us, and attracting more than $1 million in private funding, the programmers believe they are on the verge of scaling far greater heights.

The new key to their success: revolutionizing the entire news industry — starting here with their hometown newspaper. Last week, The Columbian launched the world’s first online news map under a licensing agreement that allows the newspaper exclusive use of MapWith.Us technology in much of Southwest Washington and the entire Portland metropolitan area.

For most users, the service is free with a download from MapWith.Us. Ordinary people will be able to instantly publish news that matters to them directly from their “smart” mobile telephones to the newspaper’s Web site, www.columbian.com.

The posted data will appear on the electronic map, automatically pinpointed to the correct location using the phones’ built-in GPS systems in a process called “geotagging.”

Submissions can include photographs, text and even audio and video footage captured on their mobile phones at the scene, whether it be a 10-car pile-up that closes Interstate 5 or the go-ahead touchdown at a junior varsity football game.

So-called “citizen journalism” isn’t entirely new. It ranges from local online forums to the worldwide popularity of CNN’s iReports. “What hasn’t been in place is real-time reporting from cell phones,” said Orest Pilskalns, the WSU Vancouver professor who conceived the technology behind MapWith.Us and guided a 2006 class of senior-level student programmers in developing the concepts into a commercial product. He serves as the company’s CEO while also teaching courses at the Vancouver campus.

In the media market, newspapers’ strengths have always been their depth and breadth of coverage produced by large teams of reporters, photographers and editors. But print journalists have always had a disadvantage when it comes to breaking major news events first.

Today, nearly all traditional media companies are struggling in a splintering marketplace, with advertising dollars increasingly following readers and audiences to the Internet. Falling ad revenues have forced most newspapers and other news organizations to cut staff and, in many cases, reduce coverage simply to survive.

“They’re aching to make themselves relevant in real-time reporting,” Pilskalns said of the newspaper industry. “This (technology) is pretty compelling.”

MapWith.Us is staking its future on the idea that its technology — protected with pending patents — will enable its media clients to tap into a vast, volunteer army of potential citizen journalists in a world where someone is almost always near a news event armed with a high-end phone, such as a Blackberry or an iPhone.

The technology could work for any media Web site, but newspapers could take the biggest leaps in adding immediacy and even wider coverage to their news reporting.

“It’s very exciting from that standpoint,” said Jeff Bunch, The Columbian’s Web editor. “We can’t get to all those places.”

MapWith.Us allows embedding of huge amounts of data on maps that tie in with Google’s vast mapping technology. The data gets embedded into maps in layers. Readers can then sort through all that information by location, time period, subject, source, popularity and so forth.

Bunch said The Columbian’s first news map would include reports from staff reporters and photographers only, and some of those journalists will be armed with smart phones to post reports from the field.

Sometime before year’s end, the site will debut a separate map that accepts citizen journalist reports. Citizen reports will be distinguishable on the site, but Bunch said that particularly newsworthy and verified citizen reports, and perhaps some photographs, may prove valuable to professional journalists as well.

For MapWith.Us, the agreement with The Columbian allows them to introduce the software slowly before seeking licensing deals with media outlets in other markets. Pilskalns hopes real-time reporting will prove popular enough to showcase the technology to other industries and to individual users.

“I think we are going to get some pretty good brand recognition from this,” he said. “If we can show success, we’re going to have people wanting to work with us.”

For The Columbian, the partnership adds value for its readers, perhaps attracts a wider audience and opens up revenue opportunities to make up for shrinking print advertising, Bunch said.

“First and foremost, we do want to make sure we serve the Southwest Washington area,” Bunch said.

However, he said, the paper’s leaders recognize that its exclusive license of the technology throughout the Portland area could quickly prove useful to Oregonians as well.

“I think the technology is just too powerful to sit on,” Bunch said.

The initial worry professional journalists have with citizens jumping freely into their business is the fear that reports will be inaccurate and possibly offensive. While that does happen, the concern has tapered off as news organizations draw clear lines between professional and citizen reports.

Such sites typically also enable their citizen contributors to quickly report abuses of the system. Active participants of such sites have proved reliable at keeping the sites free of unwanted content, both Pilskalns and Bunch said.

“I think the consensus in journalism is let the community police itself,” Bunch said.

Federal law has agreed with the approach so far, he added. In fact, The Columbian’s system will err toward the conservative side by automatically removing content when another user files an abuse report.

Those postings could be republished if the newspaper’s staff finds compelling reason to do so, but Bunch said they don’t want to engage in full-time policing of citizen reports.

Pilskalns said the MapWith.Us technology also has the capability to block out reports from site abusers. The technology goes well beyond citizen journalism.

The Southwest Washington Convention and Visitors Bureau, for example, uses MapWith.Us to enable its Web site users to search for specific types of restaurants or the nearest golf course.

Bunch said The Columbian’s map can tie a wealth of community resources into its own site maps, potentially targeting online advertising to the services.

Pilskalns also said individual users can employ MapWith.Us technology to instantly create maps published only for themselves, for a peer group or for a business, such as an engineering or real estate company. He uses the technology to create a private electronic journal complete with text, pictures and other data telling his own life history.

Eventually, all that data downloaded through MapWith.Us will make the company a huge repository of information that can be sorted and compiled for many purposes.

Pilskalns first started thinking about the potential commercial uses of burgeoning map technology nearly a decade ago, after working on classified projects at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.

The idea stuck with him when he returned to academia, earning his Ph.D. in computer science at WSU in 2004 and then landing a position as a research and teaching professor at the university.

Two years later, he offered the idea to a spring term class in senior-level computer science, and GeoMonkey was born.

Ten members of that original class are shareholders in the company, and three of them are full-time engineers at MapWith.Us, which this year opened offices in downtown Vancouver.

As of October, the growing company employed 10 people, including part-time student interns and other technical and business development staff.

Pilskalns and his students originally thought their best market was in social networking, where their technology would allow users not just to meet and share diverse interests, but to take it a step further by collaborating on maps of, say, favorite hiking spots or disc golf courses. But the social networking niche quickly seemed crowded, dominated by MySpace and Facebook, and subscription and advertising revenues never came close to paying the bills.

Then came the switch of focus to real-time reporting, and the money started flowing from investors who see a vast and largely untapped potential. GeoMonkey remains the corporate name, but the new product name better reflects the company’s mapping roots and professional services, Pilskalns said). Public grants helped get them started, especially with the critical patenting process that protects their product from competitors.

“We see a lot of good things happening,” Pilskalns said. “We’re the only ones in the market, and that’s a good place to be.”

Mapping technology “is a huge area in the industry right now. It seems like we got in here just at the right time,” said lead engineer Kevin Karpenske, a member of that original programming class.

Now, the more than $1 million in “angel funding” the company has attracted allows them to position their product in the marketplace without giving up company control to venture capitalists who also wanted a piece of the pie.

MapWith.Us has enough funding to sustain the company for two years, giving it time to start making money from licensing agreements. Pilskalns declined to name the private investors but said they are “visionary” technology companies, including major players in the smart phone industry.

“We’re pretty much still a pre-revenue company,” Pilskalns said. “We’ve really just come to the point where we feel our product is really solid. You only get one shot with a customer sometimes. You want to make sure you have your best foot forward.”