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Mike Kline, center, manager of the MAPSource store on Waters Avenue, works with Jorge Ubilla, left, and Marcos Sanchez, who were purchasing maps for their business, Hazen Transport. Photo: Candace C. Mundy/Tampa Tribune

TOWN - 'N COUNTRY - Gene Ingle's love for maps began at age 10 when he followed World War II maps in the newspaper.

As he grew up, Ingle drew maps for newspapers in the 1960s and later became a newspaper editor. His interest in world diagrams eventually turned into a full-time business.

The first map he created for his company was of Pinellas County in 1976 - done on his dining room table. Ingle ventured into various forms of mapmaking and created a name for himself, but it wasn't until 1991 that he and his wife, Marie, opened their first MAPSource store.

MAPSource has four locations: Orlando, Pensacola, the New Orleans area and its flagship at 5712 W. Waters Ave. in Town 'N Country. That location is the only map store in the Tampa Bay area. The company's printing plant is in St. Petersburg.

Sixteen years later, even as online maps and global positioning satellite systems are becoming more popular, MAPSource business is still going strong.

"It's because we offer the best products," Ingle said. "There were two map stores, or more, in Tampa, and we had better products than they did. We have a very loyal following in the Tampa Bay area, that's a big reason why there's only one map store."

MAPSource prides itself in the fact that it publishes its own maps. That allows the business to custom-make maps depending on consumer needs. Although the company provides international maps and globes, the main source of income is in local street atlases and wall maps.

The company also updates maps every 12 to 14 months. That is what keeps the business afloat in the age of GPS systems and online navigation sites.

"I use Google Earth, I have a GPS on my phone, still it's nice to have a map on the wall to pinpoint things," said Troy Powell, 43, of Carrollwood, who visited the store to buy a map of Mexico because he's developing property there.

"Google, you can only do so much with that."

Mike Kline, general manager of the Waters Avenue store and a Carrollwood resident, agreed.

"People still want the physical map," he said. "You can't get that on a 3-inch screen. Technology is great, but a GPS is an A to B thing. It maybe replaced the folded map but [not] wall maps. We sell hundreds and hundreds of wall maps. … Sales have gone up 15 to 20 percent every year."

County government offices, law enforcement personnel, real estate brokers and delivery services make up the bulk of MAPSource's business, Kline said.

Marcos Sanchez and Jorge Ubilla are starting a business called Hazen Transport, which will specialize in stationery delivery. The duo visited MAPSource recently to purchase several wall maps for Sarasota, Manatee, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties. The maps will come in handy for their 30 delivery drivers.

"Bottom line, GPS is good, but this will show you shortcuts, how to get there quicker," said Ubilla, 40, of Tampa. "Maps always help out better."

Ingle does not have immediate plans to open more stores, but the company is looking into distributing its maps. If all works out, there will be MAPSource-published folding maps and atlases at gas stations, Publix and Office Depot.

"Fifty years down the road, I think there will still be paper maps," Ingle said. "Looks may change, use may change, but you can't take a digital device, get up in front of a crowd and draw boundaries of your school district."

"That's only one of a thousand uses I can cite," he said. "That's why I think the paper map is here to stay."

IF YOU GO

WHAT: MAPSource

WHERE: 5712 W. Waters Ave., just east of the Veterans Expressway

HOURS: 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, by appointment only Saturday

CALL: Mike Kline, general manager, at (813) 890-9595

The bad news is MAPSource's store in New Orleans has been shut down by Hurricane Katrina.

The good news is both the staff and stock are intact. And the string of five hurricanes that ripped up the Gulf Coast the past two summers has provided the St. Petersburg-based map publisher unexpectedly brisk business.

Insurance adjusters, disaster relief agencies, the military, media and others combing the wreckage have flocked to buy the company's street maps and wire-ring binder atlases to steer them around unfamiliar territory. And who could take a quickly assembled command post seriously that did not have a laminated wall map? Even the Humane Society bought 400 MAPSource street atlases to guide volunteers searching swamped streets for abandoned pets.

"Our Gulf Coast atlases are flying out the door," said Gene Ingle, who owns MAPSource Inc. with his wife, Marie. "But I don't know whether we'll reopen in New Orleans."

Store manager Wally Dunn has been allowed back only once to assess damage at the store in Metairie and retrieve what he could. He found 3 inches of water on the floor and damaged computers. "Long term, I don't think the economy of New Orleans will be the same for at least 10 years," Ingle said.

The company needed its Web site and stores in other states to capitalize on the sales surge. Its maps of Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., have been hot sellers because they premiered only a month before Katrina hit. Nonetheless, Ingle plans to move ahead updating what will be MAPSource's eighth parish street map in the flood- prone Mississippi River Delta.

"It's amazing," he said. "One town isn't there anymore. Another one was buried under 30 feet of water."

The little publishing house - which has three cartographers, five stores and 20 employees - has exploited map market niches that eluded bigger competitors.

It has been a labor of love for Ingle, a onetime metro editor at the St. Petersburg Times, who left a career in newspapers in 1977 to pursue a lifelong obsession.

He has been a confessed map nut since age 10, when he begged to visit his father's office at a Midwest oil company. The office was filled with maps. "It was heaven," Ingle said.

A pack rat by nature, Ingle has made clutter the unifying decor theme at MAPSource's modest headquarters/print shop. The three work areas he claims as his own are flanked by bookcases overflowing with files. He fills his fellow workers' in-boxes with an endless supply of news clippings, obscure brochures and even phone books that might hold a piece of map-worthy information.

The cartographers - some of them professed "road geeks" - spin their computer graphics from databases compiled by bigger mapmakers and agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey. It's not all street maps. One cartographer compiled a mosaic poster of highway signs from all 50 states. He also claims a photo collection of every BGS (big green sign) found on the Florida interstate highway network.

Mapping brings to life the allure of the open road to cartographers. But they relish field trips to be sure remote byways they charted are still where they put them in MAPSource's last biennial update.

"A year after Hurricane Charley there are still lots of street signs missing or twisted around," said Justin Cozart, a MAPSource cartographer. "Whole mobile home parks disappeared and new ones appeared overnight."

His new map of the affected region includes the streets ofFEMA City, a Punta Gorda mobile home park the disaster agency set up for temporary housing after Hurricane Charley but has been unable to close.

Ingle didn't plan it, but Gulf Coast hurricane preparedness gave his business a lift. Map sales doubled in many Florida counties hit by hurricanes in 2004.

In Highlands County, disaster planners decided to make uniform the county's crazy quilt of road names. That helped MAPSource sell new maps by touting that 1,300 street names had changed. In Polk County, sales doubled to 1,100 atlases since three hurricanes intruded in 2004.

In Escambia County, the Sheriff's Office called MAPSource's Pensacola store manager at home after Hurricane Ivan to find street maps for disaster assistance people.

"Our guy was marooned, so he couldn't open the store. So he told the sheriff to just break in and take what they needed," Ingle said. "They took 4,000 maps. They tried to return them a couple months later. No way."

Hardly a retiring type at 71, Ingle tools around town in his "Hawkmobile," a 2004 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that's plastered with University of Iowa booster bumper stickers. The paint job is such a screaming yellow that his wife refuses to ride in it.

Ingle sold his first local mapmaking venture to Rand McNally in 1984. As soon as his noncompete agreement expired, he revved up another startup that went bankrupt within two years. The third venture, MAPSource, has grown in 14 years to annual revenues of almost $2-million. Ingle expanded to Louisiana by paying $40,000 for the New Orleans Map Co. that had been run by the same family for three generations.

In most countries, map publishing is a government function. In the United States, only a few government agencies are involved in map creation. Cities and counties make maps but do little distribution. Much of the work was privatized long ago into what has grown into a $2-billion industry

In Florida, the state Department of Transportation used to print and distribute the official state road map. Now its printing and distribution have been outsourced to Visit Florida Inc., a nonprofit tourist marketing company that pays for the state road map with sponsorship from Universal Orlando ads.

It's a fragmented industry dominated by the likes of Rand McNally and Universal Map. But plenty of regional mapmakers fill the needs of smaller markets. MAPSource maps 40 counties from Naples to Savannah, Ga., and west to New Orleans.

Nonetheless, the industry is evolving quickly. Time Warner's Mapquest and Google are big players in digitized mapping tools. Industry leaders think satellite-linked global positioning systems are the maps of the future.

"The only debate is whether GPS will come over an iPod-like device or a phone," said Sandy Hill, director of the 800-member International Map Trade Association in Hermosa Beach, Calif.

Ingle's mapmaking has been digitized since 1987. Recently MAPSource began offering some of its maps on CD-ROM. That was after a Volusia County law enforcement agency asked for street maps of a neighboring county for display on computers in police cruisers.

Ingle, however, remains steadfast that there is mileage left in the printed map. "There will always be a need for a paper map people can hold in their hands."

CARTGRAPHER is driven to get name on the map.
Copyright Times Publishing Co. Sep 20, 2003 by Connie Jones

MAPSource, which has stores in Florida and New Orleans, prides itself on the accuracy and completeness of all its map products.

It began as a mom and pop operation in a home garage. Today the local map company has 18 employees and is giving the nation's top-rated map publishers a run for their money, according to its vice president, Gene Ingle, who started MAPSource with his wife in 1991.

"Rand McNally left Tampa in May. Draw your own conclusions as to why they left," said Ingle, 69, adding that another competitor in Tampa filed bankruptcy this year.
MAPSource has retail stores in Largo, Tampa, New Orleans and Pensacola. The Largo store, at Belcher and Ulmerton roads, serves Pinellas County. Its corporate offices are in St. Petersburg.

The company, incorporated in 1994, sells about 200,000 folding maps, 30,000 street atlases and 500 wall maps a year and does custom cartography from artwork, said Ingle, who lives in Clearwater.

What sets MAPSource apart from its competition, Ingle said, is threefold - knowing names, addresses and phone numbers for its 10,000-15,000 customers; showing more mobile home parks, condominiums and subdivisions; and listing all streets by name after driving them to ensure accuracy.

"We drive more streets than any other map publisher in the country and for sure in the Southeast," he said. "Rand McNally and most other publishers depend on government sources for information. . . . We are much less inclined to accept a map from a government agency as being gospel."

Ingle said as early as four years ago, an out-of-state competitor did just that and it was the laughing stock of the community."A major map publisher printed a map showing the Toy Town Dump as a subdivision, using Toy Town streets that had been plotted by a developer, but never built," Ingle said. "It used to be a city dump and landfill and is now filled up and used as a model airplane flying field."

Ingle said he used to drive more than 50,000 miles a year to ensure the accuracy of his maps, and although he still does some driving, he now has a full-time employee who does nothing but scout streets. Jeff Kent, custom products division manager for MAPSource, said actually driving streets is the best way to ensure an accurate map. "Some mapmakers do it quick and dirty, but that's not us," Kent said."Some people are in the business just to make money, but having an up-to-date, accurate, thorough map product is our primary quest.

."People who want to get to the right place quickly use our maps." The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department puts a MAPSource map in every patrol car. Violet Bachmann, a senior procurement analyst for the sheriff's department, said the agency ordered 1,200 of the Street Atlas books. "A couple of deputies and a member of our geographical department looked at three different books and found MAPSource's Street Atlas to be the best," Bachmann said.

Ingle's success wasn't instantaneous.

Ingle graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in journalism and came to Florida in 1969 to take an editing job with the St. Petersburg Times. He left in 1976 to try his hand at full- time map making.

His first business, Map World, was started in 1971. He later sold the company to Rand McNally in 1984 when it was looking to expand its Florida market.

After working for Rand McNally for two years, Ingle left. In 1987, with the help of his brother-in-law, he formed Sun Belt Maps. Sun Belt pioneered a production system for maps on personal computers, he said. The business folded in 1991 due to a lack of customers. However, that did not stop Ingle. He believed there was money to be made in the map business, and started MAPSource out of his garage. The company produces 32 map titles from Sarasota to well west of New Orleans. They're working on 8 to 10 more.

Sales, Ingle said, have grown 10 to 15 percent during the past five years. At the end of July, sales were up 14 percent this year, he said. He wants to expand, but but won't say where for fear of competitors finding out.

Florida, he said, is the most competitive and second largest map market in the country, just behind California.

"There's a lot of room to grow in Florida," he said.
For information, call MAPSource 524-2922.