Friday, July 25, 2008

VoxVue puts real estate walk-through visualization tool at fingertips

By Christopher Calnan

After two years of beta testing, Waltham-based VoxVue Corp. is launching next month a data visualizaton tool that integrates information about commercial real estate with 3-D site images using Google Earth from Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Virtual Earth.

The company, founded by former Microsoft executive John Morey, started in 2002 by providing software to the intelligence community. But the advent of satellite-enabled technologies offering a bird’s-eye view of properties gave Morey an idea to shift the business to a more sophisticated application that evolved into VoxVue’s product.

In April, VoxVue invited potential customers to a preview of its product, called BizScape, that reveals data such as tenant identities, space dimensions and lease terms as a cursor moves over buildings and floor plans displayed on a PC. Morey said users have called BizScape the Bloomberg of commercial property, referring to the financial news service that provides data graphics of the financial markets.

London-based Savills plc, a 150-year-old real estate company, invested an undisclosed amount in VoxVue in 2006, Savills executive director David Williams said. The company has also been testing the software and providing it to clients, he said.

But Williams expects BizScape to be used by more than real estate brokers. “Everybody will want to use it across the whole gambit of professions,” he said. “It’s the next step in providing us with perfect information.”
VoxVue isn’t the only local company developing products based on free geographic tools developed by Google.

Marlborough-based startup website, YourCampus360.com offers virtual tours of college campuses and uses the Google Maps API and Javascript to simulate a walk around a college campus.

In 2006, Bridgewater State College’s GeoGraphics Laboratory developed a platform integrating a private radio system with a global positioning system and Google Maps. The mashup, a term that refers to discrete applications being combined for a new function, allows PC owners to track the locations of Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority buses.

But Morey said BizScape isn’t a mashup. Instead, the application is “immersive” with several layers of integrated information, he said. The packaged software will be sold for $1,995, while an on-demand version hasn’t been priced yet, Morey said.

Morey started his career as an analyst at Polaroid Corp. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s he worked at Microsoft, where he finished as a director of its soft image business unit. He moved on to be the CEO of Framingham-based Sound Vision Inc. before bootstrapping VoxVue in 2002.

Using BizScape is intuitive, which could save executives from needing to familiarize themselves with additional programs to retrieve data, said Eric Teicholz, president and founder of Graphic Systems Inc., a Cambridge-based firm specializing in facility management and real estate automation consulting.

“They’re not very computer literate and don’t want to learn software,” he said. “It’s a clever little product.”