Once the programming and testing had finished, it was time to package it as a product.
I wrote the necessary installers (quite tricky with DirectX) and the map slicers to create area specific editions ; I ended up with one for each national park, one for each nation, and some regionalised versions. I could slice and dice the maps in any way and release versions covering particular national trails.
I contacted my friends at Associate Design who designed and productised the materials, jewel cases and press releases.
They also produced a website and organised my britishlandscapeexplorer.co.uk domain, PayPal vendor accounts and Froogle product lists. I created a Google AdWords account based on the key power words and waited...
... the worlds not as easy as that, is it ?
I got a reasonable degree of site traffic and a reasonable number of the downloads of the demo. The AdWords worked well. People who downloaded the demo liked it and agreed that it was way cheaper than the competitors, who were mostly 2D folk with a chunk of small scale 3d added on, and massive staff overheads for which the customer paid.
I then approached specialist 'outdoor' and general IT magazines with press releases and direct calls, with demo versions etc. Good response had, but only small coverage, and no sales. What was going on ? I then twigged; the product is ground breaking when you can see vast areas of the UK in full 3d with good speed and the ability to fly anywhere you like and plan routes. However - if you only buy the edition for a particular national park, or a particular national trial, you're not going to see all that grand sweeping landscape !
The license fees for the underlying data are based on the amount of square kilometres given to any specific customer - my costs rose linearly with the data provided - which meant that my 'best' edition was about £75 for the whole the UK at 1:50,000 scale, but the real winner was the same at 1:25,000 which probably cost around £150. Much smaller editions covering the Lake District for instance were £65 (way cheaper than the opposition products, and dare I say, much better).
Ultimately the customer only got to see the true unique selling point if they spent a reasonable amount of cash - all to a completely unknown company with no market presence. Market presence means advertising at £4,000 per month per page in a national magazine - a magazine which already had a cross sponsorship deal with a competing product. It was all looking like too high a mountain to climb, and not unreasonably I cut my losses and decided to withdraw the product from sale.
If the last paragraphs seem discouraging, they are also a valuable lesson - entrepreneurs get where they get by risking everything they have; when it came to it, I wasn't willing to risk huge lumps of hard earned cash to enter a market against competitors who largely had it sewn up.
Nice product though. Its time will come. If the Ordnance Survey are forced to provide digital data without license fees, my costs drop to zero and the unique capabilities of the system will speak for themselves. Until then, its been a hell of a journey.
The British Landscape Explorer Story
First Steps - The VB6 DirectX COM Wrapper
First Landscapes - VB6
The Managed DirectX 9
Mesh Madness
Towards the Product
Adding Features
The Finished Article