Sean Simmons, president and founder of Map Jungle, may just navigate his way to a $30,000 reward.
Map Jungle, an Internet-based business that helps users find, organize and share geographic information, has made it to the third and final round of a New Ventures B.C. contest that will award seed money to the winners.
Simmons, a 41-year-old Prince George resident, will stand before a panel of judges today in Kelowna and present the Map Jungle concept. Presentations will also be made in Victoria, and the top three finishers in a group of about 17 will be handed cheques. The contest winner will receive $30,000. Second prize is $20,000 and third prize is $10,000.
Obviously, Simmons would put any cash winnings to good use. But, he's more interested in the business knowledge he has already gained -- and can continue to gain -- through this process.
"The goal, really, is to get some first-hand advice from people that have gone through the process of starting up a high-tech company," Simmons said.
"That's the great value of this competition -- it puts you in touch with people who have had the experience and can give you proper guidance, because that's one of the great gaps I face when I'm starting a new venture. There are a lot of blinders and there's not a lot of experience -- especially in Prince George -- in terms of this type of technology."
Judges include venture capitalists, financiers and investors.
Map Jungle [www.MapJungle.com] has been in development for about a year. It grew out of Simmons's other business venture, The Angler's Atlas, which he started about a decade ago.
"We have a website with the Angler's Atlas [www.AnglersAtlas.com] and have over 70,000 maps catalogued in the Angler's Atlas, and we realized that we had challenges organizing and sharing those maps. We needed a better way to do this, so we developed a technology to solve our problems," Simmons said. "It was through this we realized that anyone who organizes maps will have similar challenges, so we developed a platform that will allow anybody to organize their own maps and share their maps online.
"And it's not just recreation maps, but essentially it's any type of map," Simmons added. "So if you have GPS [global positioning system] data from your GPS unit, it can fit into the system. If you have a resource company with GIS [geographic information system] files, those types of files can be integrated into our system and it allows you to easily search and then share those products."
Simmons, who holds a masters of environmental science degree from UNBC, has been interested in maps since he was a kid.
"It's been with me as far back as I can remember," he said with a grin. "I remember tracing out maps in atlases when I was five years old."
Map Jungle is the only Prince George company in the final of the New Ventures B.C. contest.
