We know that a lot of mobile search is increasingly driven by local search. According to research from Google and the Kelsey Group last year, as much as 35%. Heck, isn’t this the future we keep hearing about? Delivering information about things around you, direct to your mobile phone? However, good geographic data is not normally attached to mobile search. So real-time local data is going to be incredibly important going forward.
Sunstone Capital has made something of a name for itself as an investor in geo-related startups with positions in trailblazers like Layar and Cloudmade, and today it is adding to that with a seed investment in InfoHubble (terms were undisclosed) alongside angel investor Tommy Ahlers. Ahlers is best known for exiting Zyb to Vodafone for €31.5m.
InfoHubble provides rich real-time mapping of such things as Point of Interest (POI) details: company data (opening hours); brand data (labels, products); review data (user reviews); inventory data (stock); and all of it is geo-coded. Its data-sets are licensed to Yellow Page providers, online map services and local search engines.
Based in Amsterdam, the startup will launch its first data-sets for the European and North American markets at the Kelsey ILM conference in Silicon Valley this week..
InfoHubble founders Pieter Grasdijk (CEO) and Maarten Janssen (CTO) have form in geolocation. They sold ilocal to TomTom/TeleAtlas in 2009 after it became the destination of choice in the Netherlands for local search.
“Without good geographic data, [mobile search] results arenʼt relevant,” says Nikolaj Nyholm, Partner at Sunstone Capital, who believes InfoHubble has “more years of expertise with real-time local data than anyone else in the market.”