"When I first got into this I thought this was the technology I was going to use for the rest of my life," said Hartmut Schwerdt, who studied cartography as a young man and is president and co-founder of Mapmobility Corp., a private company that started out making paper maps and now offers digital products.
"If we hadn't adapted, if we hadn't changed, we would not be in business."
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Schwerdt and Rita Schwerdt, company vice-president, launched the business out of their Brampton bungalow in 1978. Today the company has maps for every city and town in Canada with more than 5,000 people. In the past five years it has sold more than 15 million maps.
The company makes route and wall maps for the TTC [Toronto Transit Commission, Public Transport], custom maps for Shoppers Drug Mart and also produces maps for DirectWest, Media Pages, Tourism Toronto, Telus and Canpages.
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Since 2007 the company's revenue has been cut in half. Vice-president Dave Scott pointed to high-quality, free, digital mapping systems, GPS units and a tendency for people to steer away from paper products for environmental reasons.
Forced to adapt, Mapmobility branched out to gather and choreograph information for custom geographic information systems that provide area-specific information for digital maps that it designs.
The finished product is an online map, used by businesses or municipalities, that you can click to find major landmarks, where to buy a coffee, walk your dog off-leash, find a public pool or the local school. York Region and the Toronto Real Estate Board use the electronic product.
"We really see a niche of stylizing other people's data," said Scott.
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