New product from Whitefish tech firm one to watch

A new product from Whitefish-based technology firm Old Town Creative + Interactive is turning heads and putting the company on a list of Montana firms to watch in 2018.

The product is a content management system that, as Chief Executive Officer John Frandsen puts it, “treats geospatial content as a first-class citizen, just like text and video and photos.” It makes creating and featuring dynamic, interactive maps on websites much easier.

With that emphasis on mapping data, it has proven to be an early hit with organizations with travel websites or anyone with a lot of geospatial data to convey, such as historic preservation organizations. The state travel website for Maine was built using Elebase.io, and it won best travel website in the United States from the U.S. Travel Association.

The firm also has won contracts with organizations as diverse as National Geographic and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the town of Waterton, Alberta, and the Whitefish Farmers Market.

Right now the project is in private beta and the websites they’ve made have been done primarily by Old Town staff, but later this summer it will be moving into public release so any developer in the world will be able to start using it. Anyone will be able to go online and start building a website using the system Frandsen and his colleagues have devised, similar to using Wordpress.com to start a website right now.

One of the big advantages of this content management system is that organizations can use it to crowd-source information. The Maine tourism website is a good example; much of the content people can use to plan their trip can be found on an interactive map full of entries added by Maine residents about places they like, rather than by state employees.

This product has potential to tap into two valuable markets. Frandsen said the goal is to meld the $70 billion geospatial market with the $60 billion content management system market. That value hasn’t come easily, however. Elebase.io has been a long time in the making.

A few years ago, Frandsen and other members of his company were invited to meet with the president of the largest mapping company in the world. They presented an early iteration of their product, and mapping company representatives asked what it would take to scale it up to 200 customers.

Their product wasn’t particularly scalable, so they redesigned it with an eye toward scalability and being able to update it to keep up with the most current technology. What they came up with is nearly ready for public release.

“If you really want long-term flexibility over your product, that’s where Elebase comes into play,” Frandsen said. “One of our missions is to allow developers to build better things faster.”

Despite the firm’s recent success, Frandsen said Montana isn’t the best business environment for a company like his, especially as they look to grow. Access to capital can be difficult for businesses when much of the property is intellectual or stored on hard drives or the cloud.

Frandsen compared it to someone who wants to buy a printer. An entrepreneur can take out a bank loan to buy a printer more easily because if the business fails the bank can reclaim the printer and resell it to get at least some of its money back. In the case of tech firms, there is less property to reclaim, so borrowing large sums can be difficult.

Instead the firm seeks out investors who see value in Old Town Creative’s product. That’s typical of tech firms throughout the nation, but Frandsen said it is difficult to connect with those investors in Montana, and specifically so in the Flathead Valley.

“I think that Montana isn’t quite sure what to do with a company like ours,” he said, but added the company has received a lot of help from local economic development organizations such as Montana West Economic Development.

More information can be found at Elebase.io. For an example of what it can do, the Maine travel website can be found at www.visitmaine.com.

Reporter Peregrine Frissell can be reached at (406) 758-4438 or pfrissell@dailyinterlake.com.