Name of your website?Underhill Geomatics Ltd.
Your name?
Martin Feuchtwanger
Your Location (city, etc)
Burnaby
Please give us a short summary of your website?
We provide professional surveying, mapping, GPS, and GIS services and software to the public and private sectors in BC, the Yukon, and internationally. Our site describes those technical and professional services, and our long history. It also offers free land surveying software to the world.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
That has to be the free software we offer: Copan is a very functional and easy-to-use, geomatics engineering tool for computing and managing plane survey coordinates. It does numerous coordinate geometry (COGO) calculations, processes and adjusts raw field survey data, computes and adjusts map traverse data, performs map checks, calculates areas and perimeters, performs coordinate transformations, and imports/exports Ascii files.
It supports quadrant and whole-circle bearings, and gons (or grads) as well as degrees. It is available for Windows and two mobile platforms, PalmOS and PocketPC. The Windows version also supports south- as well as north-based bearings. The mobile versions also calculate curves and have GPS positioning and navigation functions.
That sounds very specialized, how popular has it been?
It is specialized, but we've been very pleasantly surprised by how many folks have downloaded it. In little over 18 months, we've got over 2000 users from 100 countries -- and that's due, in large part, to the help we've had from directories and bloggers like you.
How did you decide on the name Copan ?
My boss came up with it. It is somewhat suggestive of "coordinates" and "plans" which is what surveyors work with, and of "COGO" which itself is a commonly used term for coordinate geometry, the main function of the program.
And what about the logo you have for Copan? It looks somehow Central American..
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Yes, it's meant to look Mayan. Some believe that the ancient Mayan city of Copan, in what is now Hondurus, had some scientific significance related to geographic coordinates.
What is your eventual goal for the site? (How do you see things develop?)
Since our main business function is — and has been for nearly 100 years — to provide surveying services in western Canada, we will continue to make refinements to our site to support and promote that function, possibly adding more descriptions or explanations of our services for the laymen.
And the software side of things?
We're always expanding the capabilities of Copan, and some time this year we hope to release a commercial version that has extra functionality, especially with regards to drafting capabilities.
So you hope it will eventually make money for you?
Yes, of course. But even if that doesn't happen — meaning, if we don't sell enough copies considering the time we put into it — it is still useful software that we rely on ourselves and it must surely help our professional reputation.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Is that what happens when sites get featured by you? Great! Seriously though, about the same time started offering the free software we switched from using a third-party web and email service provider to building and using our own server. We had a few bumps and bruises along the way, but we've already just done a significant hardware upgrade and are confident we can handle greater demand.
What unexpected headaches have you had to deal with?
Email service. It's a constant battle trying to minimize the incoming spam at the same time as allowing in legitimate mail and trying to send out mail to our clients or software downloaders that doesn't look like spam to their mail servers! Any ideas?
Sorry, that's not our area. What else would you like to say?
Thanks for showing an interest in us. Can I ask you another question, though?
Sure.
If you let almost any legitimate website get listed in your directory, and in a manner that the site owner has so much control over, how come Directory Classifieds not much more popular? What can website owners do to help you?
What is your website address?
Underhill Geomatics Ltd.
