This article examines 1990s Internet firm Zip2 as an early case study in the political economy of location-based services (LBS) and “smart” cities in the United States. Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s first startup, Zip2, combined digital maps built using public spatial data with computerized Yellow Pages listings to create city directory Web portals for daily newspapers. Examining the technical affordances, labor practices, and revenue models of the company’s two key data providers, NavTech and American Business Information, reveals the conditions that enabled Zip2 to successfully employ data arbitrage as a corporate strategy. Despite its significant limitations as a consumer-facing technology, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq for $300 million in 1999. The company’s founders leveraged government investment in digital mapping, fortuitous shifts in copyright law, and anxiety among newspaper publishers about missing the Internet boom into a business that prefigured many of the use cases and revenue models of contemporary LBS and Web maps. Key Words: computer navigation, data arbitrage, location-based services, smart cities, web mapping.

本文考察了1990年代的互联网公司Zip2，将其作为美国位置服务（LBS）和“智能”城市的政治经济学的早期案例研究。特斯拉首席执行官埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）的第一家创业公司Zip2将使用公共空间数据构建的数字地图与计算机化的黄页列表结合起来，创建了日报的城市目录Web门户。对公司的两个主要数据提供商NavTech和American Business Information的技术支持，劳动惯例和收入模型进行了研究，揭示了使Zip2成功地将数据套利作为公司战略使用的条件。尽管Zip2作为面向消费者的技术有很大的局限性，但1999年被Compaq以3亿美元的价格收购。该公司的创始人利用政府对数字地图的投资，版权法的偶然变化，关键词：计算机导航，数据套利，基于位置的服务，智慧城市，网络地图。