Australian mapping technology streets ahead of Google Earth?

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 22 July 2008 10:39

IT Industry - Deals

According to Ipernica, NearMap's founder Stuart Nixon has been at the forefront of geospatial industry for almost 20 years. He founded ER Mapper, a global geospatial software company, subsequently purchased by multinational Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imagery in 2007 and now part of the Erdas group and was the architect of the ER Mapper application and the Image Web Server technology that pioneered serving image maps over the web.

He is an honorary fellow of the Spatial Sciences Institute, the recipient of the Australian Society for Exploration Geophysicists Award for Innovation in Applied Geoscience and the holder of US patents relating to image compression, processing and serving technologies. He will remain CEO of NearMap following completion of the acquisition and will have full operational responsibility for the business under Ipernica ownership.

Ipernica describes its mission as being to "identify valuable intellectual property from research institutions and companies across Asia Pacific, and realises value through international IP licensing programs, the formation and incubation of spin-out companies and the provision of commercialisation services."

The company in its present form arose in 2002 when, then known as QPSX, it raised $10m with an IPO and a promise to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in licence fees from intellectual property developed and commercialised by QPSX in the 1980s which is essential to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology. It has now raised tens of million of dollars from this and other IP after several court cases against multinational telco equipment manufacturers.