it was there in the city by the chesapeake that colin founded spotcry.t's a website that maps crime data. >> it's crime data. it's not super sexy. >> reporter: but it is a business, one that employs roughly 30 part-time workers and claims more than 1 million subscribers. those customers use it to look city by city, even block by block at the incidence of crime. arrests, assaults, burglaries, shootings. he says his data cover roughly 70% of the u.s. the price -- nothing for subscribers. drain makes his money by selling ads on his website and to accompany the 150 million or so e-mail alerts he sends out annually. that revenue, he says, should total more than $300,000 this year. then there are fees from partners like trulia, the real estate company, that pay to tap spotcrime's data. acquiring and scrubbing that data isn't easy. >> the expectation is that all police departments collect the data the same way, and if you just ask, they'll give it to you, and that is absolutely not the case. >> reporter: every law enforcement agency in the country, about 18,000