Duncan McCall's Page

I’m the founder of PublicEarth. To cut a long story short the concept for PublicEarth came to me quite a few years ago, in the middle of a car rally from London to Gambia in West Africa.

After downloading a set of waypoints for my GPS from the internet to navigate across a minefield in Mauritania, and meeting fellow travelers crossing the Sahara and always exchanging waypoints and notes with them – it became obvious to me that the creation and sharing of location based information was going to be huge in the near future, and that there had to be a better way to do it…since there was an increasing sea of information and it was very hard to sift through and find relevant, intelligent information.

So the idea for a wiki of ‘interesting’ or ‘long tail’ places was born, with ability for users to create, edit and share information in an structured, categorized and intelligent format – with the simple ability to get this information onto mobile and GPS devices.

After a lot of energy, effort and perseverance the project was funded by Polaris Venture Partners, and we set about building out what was a big and audacious vision.

The overall goal of PublicEarth is to be a platform for you – the users, to create and share intelligent information about places, so please take a good look around, and let us know what you like, and what you think we can do better!


In case you are interested, one of my primary selfish interests in having a tool like PublicEarth I myself could use, was that one of my primary passions has been exploration and travel. I’ve been lucky enough to visit 70 something countries, and had some pretty silly adventures along the way.

I also enjoy skiing, fishing, surfing, diving, well most things involving water frozen or otherwise – and have an unhealthy obsession with all things propelled by internal combustion…