Google and GeoEye: Argle-bargle or Fufurah?

September 15, 2008 10 Comments

And I, for one, welcome our new geospatial overlords

And I, for one, welcome our new geospatial overlords

I didn’t bother to blog about the Google and GeoEye announcement (Google launches satellite?  Are you kidding me Information Week?) from a couple weeks ago (or was it a couple days ago?) because I really didn’t see what was so newsworthy about it.  It isn’t like this is the first announcement we’ve seen from Google and a satellite company.  Plus Microsoft even went out and bought Vexcel (hmm didn’t blog about that acquisition either).

I just don’t care too much about these deals as they don’t affect me in any way.  I still aquire my imagery the way I did before and I still use the free services the way I did before.  The only thing this confirms to me is that you can’t make money from selling sattelite imagery on an open market, you need a sugar daddy to pay the bills.  I guess that is what is the most telling thing out of this announcement, GeoEye’s and Digital Globe’s business models are broken.

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License Microsoft Virtual Earth Imagery For Your Maps

August 25, 2008 16 Comments

ESRI and Microsoft announced that Virtual Earth would be available through the ArcGIS Online Premium Service a couple weeks ago and today Microsoft took that announcement one step further.

Starting today you can license Virtual Earth UltraCam (proprietary) aerial photography without having to license the Virtual Earth platform. This is great for offline use, wrapping your own client or creating an interface that allows for deeper zooming than the VE platform does today. You can purchase the photography through 2 vendors – Mapmart and i-Cubed.

Of course ESRI users will probably prefer to use the ArcGIS Online service (given how easy it will be to integrate into your existing projects), but now everyone has the same access and the freedom to use any software (Photoshop, Illustrator, gvSIG, MapInfo, AutoCAD, etc) they wish.

The only caveat is that this is the UltraCam imagery, not everything so you may not have anything available if you live outside of 200+ cities that have coverage.  Of course if you do have it available, then there isn’t anything better as UltraCam blows away everything else.  Microsoft’s purchase of Vexcel has really been very smart for them and this is what you can do when you own the data.  I can buy UltraCam imagery for Tempe, AZ for about $4,000 from MapMart.

You cant afford one yourself, but you can use the data captured from it.

You can't afford one yourself, but you can use the data captured from it.

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