So what do you call a former nonprofit department that got too big and was spun out to be a for-profit company? A spin-up? That’s what Boundless CEO Eddie Pickle is calling his Arlington, Va.-based geospatial company. It’s been a year since it spun out of NYC-based OpenGeo to be a revenue-generating company doing commercial and government work. It used to be that geospatial meant taking data and putting it into a map. But Eddie says open source has made it possible to use the large amounts of data in different ways.
The FCC used the Boundless software to make its data on broadband speeds accessible online, making it one of the most heavily used government sites. Ericsson hired the company to create a map to visualize cell phone traffic and to diagnose service problems. Boundless, which has 50 employees in Arlington, NYC, and Canada, also organizes geospatial meetups in DC, including one for open source geospatial software and another for women in geospatial technology. Eddie, a Knoxville, Tenn.-native, says the field is in need of more diversity.
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