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Universal Mind Inc. is getting ready to flex its muscles.
On the strength of the rich Internet applications it develops, the code shop bootstrapped in Westfield has grown to 50-plus full-time employees. It’s expanding into the applications software business with a mapping software product called SpatialKey now in private beta.
SpatialKey turns tabular data, such as customer spreadsheets, into geographic representations. Universal Mind decided to launch a product after developing similar applications for several customers, said president Brett Cortese.
“Small businesses need an application like this,” Cortese said. Most legacy geographic information system solutions are provided as custom applications built for large enterprise, he said. “We were seeing what the technology was going to be capable of compared to what existing solutions provided.”
Accordingly, a software-as-a-service version of SpatialKey starts at $25 per month per seat. Cortese said enterprise-scale deployments using large amounts of data are priced significantly higher.
Early adopters include the police department in Ogden, Utah — one of the earliest test cases for SpatialKey. The Ogden police use the software to map out almost any kind of crime or judicial statistics, comparing crime data with patrol patterns, parolee addresses, warrants and constantly updated lists of gang members or known drug houses in the city of 78,000, just north of Salt Lake City. They use the information to make decisions about who, where and what to investigate.
“I was a police officer for 20 years,” said department crime analyst David Weloth, who is now a civilian police employee. “This does in minutes what it would have taken me hours of police work to put together.”
Universal Mind, which works heavily in Flex, Adobe Systems Inc.’s rich media programming language, began exploring product possibilities for a mapping application in 2007 under the code name Launchpad. Development of SpatialKey began in earnest last year, Cortese said.
“There never has really been a move to create a consumer (GIS) tool,” said David Cole, director of platform services at Denver-based Mapquest Inc., which provides the maps SpatialKey uses through an application programming interface.
The next step for developers like Universal Mind may be to make similar inroads into the computer-aided design software market, Cortese said. Some of the same capabilities that have allowed Universal Mind to bring GIS to market are also allowing the beginnings of an expansion into 3-D imaging applications for the web.
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