Assessing tornado damage, mapping Minnesota's water quality, creating new views of the Frogtown neighborhood, measuring the performance of a fire department's response: these tasks might seem unrelated, but they fall under the umbrella of geographics research, and a new startup is ready to take on even more.
Flat Rock Geographics, based in St. Paul, is the blend of two previous startup companies, mixing the skills and talents of their founders.
Paul Wickman started Northstar Geographics in 2007, growing it into a sizeable organization with international clients. GIS Rangers, started by Blaine Hackett in 2002, provided on-site GIS services to numerous municipalities, watershed districts, and private clients.
The two met while sharing coworking office space at
CoCo, and Hackett notes that they complemented each other nicely. "Paul is more into web application development, and I'm in the geographic information systems realm," he says. "In this field, you get many people from a geography background, but they don't know much about computer science. Now, we have the best of both worlds."
They kicked off 2012 with the formation of the new company, and already they have a robust list of services that they offer, including GIS consulting, web applications, mobile apps, and geospatial business intelligence. Clients include municipalities like Fridley and Columbia Heights, as well as the Science Museum of Minnesota, 3M, and Second Harvest Heartland.
Projects can vary--the Frogtown effort, for example, had Flat Rock look at map data collected by interns over the past few years. There wasn't any consistency to the mapping, so Flat Rock created a tool that allowed users to do mobile data collection about the neighborhood.
For the future, Hackett believes that Flat Rock is off to a strong start, thanks to the business and market experience of its founders. "This is a very exciting time for us," he says. "We're looking forward to seeing where we can go."
Source: Blaine Hackett, Flat Rock Geographics
Writer: Elizabeth Millard