Cartica.com launches maps e-tail site

BOULDER — Six months ago locally based Cartica.com, an online provider of maps and map-related services, didn’t even have any furniture in its offices at 3775 Iris Ave.

“We’re a true startup. We started this thing from scratch,” says Douglas Gerull, chief executive officer and president of Cartica, which now has 10 employees, compared with two in September.

But while many other startups are getting lost in a jungle of emerging dot-coms, officials at Cartica believe they’ve got an idea that will set them apart from other e-commerce sites. “This is a niche that no one else is really fielding well,” Gerull says.

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According to him, Cartica is different because it offers a tremendous number of mapping products, for both consumers and professionals, in one place and makes the products easy to find and buy. The site has products grouped in categories ranging from their potential use to the name of the manufacturer.

“To go to a single place and find all the maps, atlases or GPS (Global Positioning System) devices and then have them grouped by type of use, type of product and type of manufacturer has not been done before,” Gerull says.

Cartica.com is also unusual because, according to Gerull, “there’s really nowhere else you can go and say, ‘Yes, I know that site is truly neutral,’ in the sense that they don’t make their own GPS receivers or their own maps.”

Cartica offers a fair, unbiased representation of the products they sell, he says. And while Cartica may offer a special service, Gerull realizes the company’s success depends on making the site easy to use and keeping customers happy.

“Yes, we better make it easy to buy, and we better make it so that you always can find a better selection of products on our site,” he says.

“One of the challenges in forming the company was ‘why are we different and why should you come here.’ It’s easy to buy here. It’s easy to find what you want. We want to keep making the buying experience easier and easier,” he says.

But only now will Cartica.com start finding out just how marketable an idea it has and how consumer-friendly its site really is. “Literally, for about four or five months now, we’ve just been in the developing and hiring mode,” Gerull says. “We just turned the site on.”

According to Regina Morton, Cartica’s vice president of sales and marketing, since January the company has been focusing on consumer products, which include digital maps, GPS receivers, globes, topographic maps, atlases, desk sets, antique reproductions and historic and reference maps.

Morton says Cartica concentrated on its consumer products first because “we wanted to get online and start selling products,” without having to add all the functions and features of a site geared toward professional products. Now Morton says the company is in the midst of focusing on the professional side of its site.

Gerull says Cartica’s long-term focus is on professional business-to-business products such as heavy-duty GPS receivers for businesses and more complex topographic maps for engineering and architectural firms. Until then, he says the site’s technical capabilities will continue to progress to support business transactions better. “That boils down to better financial mechanisms to support different kinds of purchasing means,” he says.

Besides consumer and professional products, Gerull says Cartica also will be providing services such as traveling directions starting in March or April. Some of the services will be free and some will come with a fee.

So, as this new startup expands its services and develops its site, anyone who’s watched dot-com companies strike it rich might ask when Cartica.com will go public.

“We are well-capitalized,” Gerull says, with funding coming from the site’s primary owner, MacDonald Dettwiler. “There’s a certain mania about taking e-commerce companies public, and we’re not unaware of that. At the same time, when you go public there’s got to be a need for it – to raise cash to do something. We have enough cash now to do what we need to do.

“Our goal is to be the best and largest Internet source for maps and mapping needs and to continue an aggressive program of providing Web-based geographic information services to our customers,” he says.

Gerull says Cartica has some equally ambitious goals for making money although he wouldn’t specify what they are.