Private Equity Hub and VentureBeat are both reporting on the funding of an almost complete unknown Web 2.0 startup called PublicEarth. Very little is mentioned in the press releases on the wire about the company, and even less is revealed on the PublicEarth website (which consists mostly of a logo and an email address, and seems to have been put together in FrontPage). Both of the reports are identical, and note that they're a "San Francisco-based startup that is developing a database of location-specific content," and have "raised $3.05 million in Series A funding."
I did a little bit of deeper digging on the company, as there is certainly a lot left to do in the space of global mapping, and wondered exactly what they'd be doing above and beyond that what the industry leaders seem to be doing in the space. I found a fairly long-winded explanation over at Commercenet, which didn't really give me the impression they were doing much more than Google Maps is presently doing, although they claimed in the interview that what they were doing was original.
PublicEarth's goal is to become the premier data source for this next generation of location specific data and content. They define next generation location specific data and contact, in its essence, in the same way that the Google Maps Mashups work: "content attached through geographical coordinates to relevant points of interest in the physical world, describing in organized detail the attributes of those points of interest, accessible through a simple intuitive web mapping interface."