We are incredibly thrilled to share the news that FortiusOne is acquiring Mapufacture. You can read more about the news at HighEarthOrbit, the FortiusOne blog, and Brain Off. Here is the official press release.

We have a history of working closely with the team at FortiusOne. Together we share a common vision of building the pieces of the GeoWeb with free, accessible data and easy to use geospatial tools. They recently released GeoCommons Finder! that enables easy sharing of KML, CSV, and Shapefile data, and will very soon be announcing more pieces of the GeoCommons suite.

By comparison, Mapufacture has been focused on tying into the dynamic geoweb of syndicated data and web services. We’ve built adapters to many social and map making sites, as well as generally gathering up the available GeoRSS and KML that has been emerging and providing interfaces to find, visualize, and access these in a variety of formats.

Together, FortiusOne and Mapufacture will be able to push the concept of freely, and easily accessible federated geospatial data - and easy to use tools for advanced map-making and collaboration. The team at FortiusOne could not be better - they are rock stars, GIS-wizards, and all excited about really pushing out the technology.

Building Mapufacture has been an incredible experience. What started out as a project to demonstrate an index of a new format called GeoRSS grew into a company that effectively demonstrated geospatial aggregation and provided free mapping tools to organizations and individuals around the world.

Mapufacture.com will remain active for the near future. At some point we’ll begin offering users the option to migrate their accounts and data to the GeoCommons suite.

Thank you to our users, supporters, and partners. We’re looking forward to continue building the GeoWeb together.