Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
MapQuest
Summary
MapQuest (stylized as mapquest) is an American free online web mapping service. It was launched in 1996 as the first commercial web mapping service. MapQuest vies for market share with competitors such as Google Maps and Here.
MapQuest's origins date to 1967 with the founding of Cartographic Services, a division of R.R. Donnelley & Sons in Chicago, which moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1969. In the mid-1980s, R.R. Donnelley & Sons began generating maps and routes for customers, with cooperation by Barry Glick, a University at Buffalo Ph.D. In 1994 it was spun off as GeoSystems Global Corporation. Much of the code was adapted for use on the Internet to create the MapQuest web service in 1996. MapQuest's original services were mapping (referred to as "Interactive Atlas") and driving directions (called "TripQuest").
Sensing the emerging demand for spatial applications on the Internet, and with crippling network latency in Lancaster, the executive team of Barry Glick and Perry Evans moved MapQuest to the up-and-coming LoDo area of Denver, Colorado.
The initial Denver team consisted of Evans, Simon Greenman, Chris Fanjoy and Harry Grout. To make MapQuest a serious contender in the online spatial application market, a robust set of geographical tools was developed under Greenman's direction. Grout, who had spent time at Rand McNally, Etak and Navigation Technologies Corporation building digital map data, was tasked with acquiring data and licensing arrangements. The initial team experienced rapid growth in the Denver office, and in a short time MapQuest was becoming a well-known brand.
On 25 February 1999, MapQuest went public, trading on Nasdaq. In December 1999, America Online (AOL) announced it would acquire MapQuest for $1.1 billion. The deal closed in 2000. Chief Operating Officer / Chief Financial Officer Jim Thomas managed these transactions.
For a period, MapQuest included s through a licensing deal with GlobeXplorer, but later removed them because of the unorthodox business mechanics of the arrangement brokered by AOL.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.