Dave Naffziger's Blog

It was kind of cool to see Quova float across my VentureBeat feed late last week. Enterprise companies rarely cross the startup feeds, particularly those that are infrastructure companies. It is also amusing to see how the media reports news from companies you are actually quite familiar with.

The VentureBeat article is here and Quova’s press release is here. Other than making up a competitor that doesn’t exist (DoubleClick), there wasn’t any real analysis in the VB article or facts that couldn’t have been found in the press release.

The on-demand geolocation from Quova is significant because it drastically reduces the entry cost for world-class IP geolocation. We had experimented with a similar service nearly 6 years ago, but never really had the business structure to really sell or develop the service. The company that will most likely be affected is MaxMind, a tiny company that produces ok geolocation data. They’ve sold primarily to companies that were too small to afford Quova’s technology and have been successful amongst the solo-developer crowd.

I’ve been on the east coast for just under a week and of course have been using gmail and google calendar regularly. I’m pretty attentive to geolocation cues and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this question appear in my calendar:

This is the type of thing that we envisioned people would do with IP geolocation data years ago when we launched Quova. Of course data accuracy and business imperatives got in the way for a while. It does make for a great product refinement though.