We're going to start up the next season of HWJF but in the meantime I'm revisiting all the great Google Hangout episodes as podcasts. These have been modified to be audio only (the best one can with a visual medium).

In this episode Madeline and I talk with WeoGeo's CEO and co-founder, Paul Bissett, who describes where it all began, and explains the differences between data marketplaces and data-as-a-feature offerings in the spatial data industry. Marketplaces connect buyers and sellers of data reducing the importance of a customer's software package to the process. In contrast, data-as-a-feature offerings bring high-quality data directly into a software package, allowing software vendors to use their purchasing power to bring free or low-priced data to their customers and creating lock-in potential for the software vendor. He argues that data-as-a-feature arrangements serve the software vendors well, but that in the long run commercial data providers might do better to take their products directly to individual consumers.

It's always interested to go back and time to see what you were working on and how the world viewed data in marketplaces.

Special Guest: Paul Bissett.