Kyle
An Austrian startup called GeoPieces has come up with a geo-tagged map based platform to share all of your worldly content. Whether you’re traveling to London to take in a football game or Barcelona for a quick romp through Spain you can now take the content that you produce and put it all together on GeoPieces map of the world.
The idea is great for world travelers or anyone who wants to keep a geo based record of everything they’ve done. The advantage to a site like GeoPieces over traditional check-in and discovery apps is that you can share as much or as little as you want, whenever you want and the way that you want. No other site gives you the freedom and flexibility to do this quite the same way that GeoPieces does.
You can also explore the map and see the things that other users are publicly sharing. You could end up finding the next great piece of art worth checking out or a truly great view on a sandy beach somewhere around the world.
GeoPieces was founded by Erich Drazdansky and Jorg Eibl two entrepreneurs who keep the same crazy founder schedule that startups in the states typically keep. Work, no sleep, more work. That shows in the UI of GeoPieces.
We got a chance to talk with the team behind GeoPieces in the interview below:
What is GeoPieces?
Geopieces lets you share your geotagged Information on the World Map. You can add images and videos to the map, write blog entries at locations or leave tips, reviews and comments.
We want the whole world map to be your playground to share with your friends and the world what is going on around the globe. Geopieces is currently available at www.geopieces.com and we are working diligently on producing a mobile website and apps so everyone can have fun on the go.The really neat thing that distinguishes us from current location based services is that we do not restrict the user to check-ins or other gimmicks for interaction. You can actively share whatever you want, however you want. In a Reddit-like fashion great shares will be voted to the top so everyone can discover the really great and interesting stories around them.
Geopieces also offers a completely new virtual property system, which allows users to buy a “Geopiece” a territory on the map. This pieces can be customized by the buyer, in order to highlight yourself or your business ideas and are prominently placed as visual elements on all content that users contributed to the area. In later mobile versions you will be able to walk around and check out who owns the territories you are travelling on and see what is new around you.
These Geopieces are not only cool things to have but can also be bought and sold on our market system, they also serve as a self-service advertising system, that helps you highlight your content. It is like a billboard on the map.
In layman’s terms, how does it work?
Basically it let´s you share stories and notes on the map, wherever, whenever. The story gets tagged to your relevant location so you can show on the world map what is going on and what you are up to. You can tell your stories using text, youtube videos, images and event dates.Or you go exploring on the map. Look for cool things around you and see what others are up to.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Geopieces was founded by Jörg Eibl and Erich Drazdansky.Erich Drazdansky is a successful businessman working in the areas of FMCG drinks and real estate investment, breaking into the world wide web.
Jörg Eibl is a Ruby on Rails and Postgres enthusiast, who has founded his own web development company at age 18 and brings more than 10 years experience in web development to the company. He also designed the prototype himself without any help and enjoys working long hours and having no time to sleep.
Where are you based?
Geopieces is currently based in Wiener Neustadt, Lower Austria.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
Sadly it is not Palo Alto, but slowly central Europe is changing to become a new hub for great startups. Our great opportunity will be the Pioneers Festival in Vienna in October, uniting the greatest of the worldwide startup scene in our small nations capital.
How did you come up with the idea for Geopieces?
We wanted to use mapping technology to create something fun and new and build a trading system for virtual properties.
How did you come up with the name?
The name comes from the virtual real estate calculations, which uses Geocoding technology. Every real estate is a piece on the map. So, Geopieces.
What problem does Geopieces solve?
We allow free roaming on the world map. We don´t want to restrict our users like other location based plattforms do and we really strive to have location based content organized without telling the user of how much of his story he can tell or what media to use to tell it.
What’s your secret sauce?
We feel that we have a major technological advantage in the sector.We divide the world into 33.5 Billion virtual properties on the world map, which can be bought, sold and traded and act like billboards on the map. All of the virtual real estate is automatically calculated from longitude and latitude data.
The whole application is a one-page application written in backbone, all content is reloaded by ajax and all templates are pre compiled server side using handlebar templating.
What’s one dilemma you’ve encountered in the startup process?
Restraint. You must always think about what features are needed to make it work and what features are superfluous. Especially when you are working on a concept that is new you need to be simple and straightforward and spend a lot of time on your design and options in order to not overwhelm the consumer.
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?
The whole world is made up of such a high number of pieces that we had to find an algorithm to fetch them without the need to store them to the database immediately.
What’s next for GeoPieces?
The great market force in our sector is mobile applications and quite frankly it is the future. We want to be the next great social sharing application that really centers its value proposition on location.Therefore our next steps will be designing a mobile web solutions and developing apps for android and iPhone. We are especially interested in the Android market as many developers of social apps seem to be ignoring this market in favour of heavy iPhone development.
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