Online maps show the way to success

Project X Technology staff, from left, Nick Chapman, Tomek Piatek, Ross Lin and founder John Clegg.

A service that enables web users to quickly find street directions in New Zealand and Australia has put new Wellington company Project X Technology on the map.

The company is behind the ZoomIn online maps service and smaps.co.nz, introduced by auction website Trade Me last month.

Both services are based on mapping data provided by Terralink and are designed in the flexible AJAX (asynchronous Java and XML) web standard now in vogue among web developers.

"People are only now getting a handle on what they can do with all this AJAX stuff," says Project X Technology founder John Clegg.

"Before, mapping was a luxury and difficult to use."

Now users of ZoomIn and smaps simply enter a street address into a search engine and are taken to the exact location on a map that can be navigated and magnified with the click of a mouse button. The real benefit over existing online mapping services is how quickly everything happens.

"We're the discount airliner of the mapping world," says Clegg. "Fast and easy to use."

In keeping with the Google-driven trend in web services, ZoomIn is free, and is frequently modified with improvements suggested by users.

That's the way things work in the "Web 2.0" environment says Clegg, who started Project X after years in the online auction business.

Clegg was part of the team that set up Bid or Buy, one of the first online auction services for the Indian market.

Bid or Buy grew rapidly in 2000 and merged with its Rupert Murdoch-backed rival Baazee in 2001.

Clegg stayed on until 2003, shifting from Sydney to Bombay to work as Baazee's chief technology officer.

Baazee sold to eBay in 2004 for about US$50 million. A shareholder in Baazee, Clegg left with the money that would finance Project X.

"It was not a substantial stake but reasonable. You could loosely say eBay funded my start-up."

But the 16-hour days toiling in Bombay took their toll and, on returning to New Zealand, Clegg was in poor health. It was while laid-up after an operation to remove a "bullet-sized" kidney stone that he came up with the idea for an online maps service.

Browsing an internet news group, he met web developer Ben Nolan. They began formulating a plan to build a mapping service.

"It wasn't until later that Ben realised I was doped on morphine in those early meetings," says Clegg.

"Then we started in my apartment building a product."

That was last August. A year on, Project X has lost Nolan to the "overseas experience", taken on three other developers, launched ZoomIn in Australia and added aerial photography to the mapping service.

A unique aspect of the mapping website is that every address listed is given a unique web address so users can email the web link to friends who need only click on the link to go to the location on the map.

Project X has built a version of ZoomIn for mobile devices, but Clegg said the high bandwidth costs of accessing mapping on mobile phones ruled out a commercial release of a mobile service for the time being.

Clegg's background in online auctions made it easy to relate to Trade Me founder Sam Morgan who Clegg describes as "level-headed" and "a tough negotiator".

Project X worked closely with Trade Me's developers to integrate smaps into the Trade Me website.

"They're very conscious of speed. Full credit to their technical team, they're at the forefront of web technology in New Zealand," says Clegg, who remains interested in online auctions.

"In auctions, there's only one winner, you cannot beat the market leader," says Clegg who believes Trade Me rivals such as Zillion will be hard-pressed to make progress against the auction heavyweight.

"I learned that the hard way in Australia. It's no fun fighting for third or fourth place."

Project X is now in Wellington's Creative HQ incubator which gives Clegg and his colleagues office space shared with other new companies.

Clegg said there was an appetite for investment in technology start-ups, and plenty of companies capable of attracting money.


PROJECT X TECHNOLOGY

* Who: John Clegg, founder.

* What: Web-based mapping applications.

* Where: Wellington.

* Why: "We're the discount airliner of the mapping world; fast and easy to use."