Mountain View, California-based Quova was founded in 2000, initially providing information to web site owners on the geographic location of visitors to their sites by taking their IP address and applying algorithms to work out where they were.
Quova CEO Marie Alexander said the information was sold as a service to search engines, content providers, and advertising companies, all of which could tailor their offerings without the need for cookies and without requiring visitors to fill in a profile form on their site.
The service is delivered from a database called GeoPoint. The on-premise technology that accesses it is called the GeoDirectory Server, of which the new version is 6.0. Alexander said the structure of the reference files themselves can often undergo major changes so a new version of the database must be downloaded to a customer’s site each time they access the service rather than just a delta with a few changes.
Hand-mapping
The Quova service evolved in technical terms with the acquisition of Dutch competitor RealMapping in 2001. Whereas we collected data automatically, they took a hand-mapping approach, she said. It was very accurate, but didn’t scale well, so we combined the two technologies to get the best of both. She said the company went from a database of publicly available information that we built and sold cheaply, with minimal research to hand-mapped service with teams in Holland, the US, and Japan researching the networks that comprise the internet as an ongoing project.
Quova has also expanded the type of company targeted for its services, from search and content companies wanting to tailor information to a visitor’s geography, to ones that for legal reasons have to block access from certain places, such as gambling sites that cannot allow visitors from the US or Holland, or financial services companies that must not give IPO information to people in certain countries.
There’s also a fraud-detection element when, say, someone wants to use their credit card from an unusual country, Alexander said. Another use is in digital rights management, where broadcast content has been licensed for specific countries or states, such as with sporting events such as the World Cup soccer tournament, the World Series in baseball, or the Olympics.
Proxy Locator
The company talks about three phases of development of its services. The first was IP geolocation, followed by a second Alexander called IP intelligence, which she said is where we go beyond location to get an idea of the cyberlocation/domain, with the knowledge of which IP addresses are actually obscuring their real location by coming in through a proxy.
One of the extensions to the platform in v6.0 is Proxy Locator, which is technology acquired last year from Illuminati that enables Quova in many cases to see past the proxy server and locate the originating internet connection. Proxy Locator determines if a web visitor is attempting to mask their true location by accessing a customer’s web site through a proxy server.
Mexens client for wireless locationing
The next phase is what Alexander called internet location intelligence, again delivered in v6.0 but this time with third-party technology, the Mexens client software, which when downloaded to a laptop, smart phone, or PDA, enables the user’s location to be mapped to a database of WiFi and cellular infrastructure to pinpoint them.
It’s a Java applet that can be put on a laptop OS but also supports Windows Mobile, Symbian with Nokia’s S60 UI, BlackBerry, and various Treos from Palm, said Alexander. A version of the client for Symbian with the UIQ user interface from Sony Ericsson.
Apart from its acquisition of RealMapping in 2001, Quova also bought another rival, Infosplit, in 2004, and today considers itself the market leader in the IP geolocation sector. Alexander did mention two other companies in the space, NetGeo and MaxMind, but said that while they both collect location data for web sites, they use it mainly for fraud detection rather than the broader remit Quova sets for itself.
Community model for database construction
Cyril Houri, founder and CEO of New York-based Mexens, explained that the company builds its database of WiFi and cell tower infrastructure through a community of data collectors who, armed with their GPS-enabled phones fitted with its Navizon software client, move around in an area, such that the client automatically feeds info back to Mexens for inclusion on the database. People with non-GPS devices, meanwhile, pay a one-time fee of $24.99 for the Navizon client, with which they can then use the WiFi-and-cellular triangulation-based locationing service Mexens calls Virtual GPS, with the money from the fees being returned to the data collectors in the form of credits on PayPal.
We given them two tokens for each AP and 10 for each cell tower, and when they’ve got 10,000 tokens they can redeem them for $20 on PayPal, he explained. He added that Mexens offers the service from a database in its network, but enterprises can also acquire a copy of the database, regularly updated with fresh information on APs and cell towers, to be hosted on their servers.
Our View
The addition of wireless locationing to the Quova offering is an interesting extension that should enable Quova to start addressing the enterprise market where customers will mandate that mobile employees download the client to their devices so as to be locatable.
Another interesting point is that Mexens founder Houri previously founded and ran Infosplit, so he is no stranger to Quova. If the Mexens client proves to be a generator of significant revenue, Quova might be moved to make another acquisition.
