So Where 2.0 is going on and I haven’t seen that much of interest (If you need to have Robert Scoble do an interview of your company on stage, then clearly you’ve got nothing to talk about). One thing that is news in our space is this Google Earth Builder.
It lets you upload, process and store your geospatial data in our cloud. Your employees can use familiar tools – Google Maps and Google Earth – to easily and securely share and publish mapping data. No technical expertise or GIS training is required.
There is a website that has a very little actual information about what it does. Some spin from Google seems to indicate this product is aimed at the mainstream. I’m not sure what the mainstream is, but I suspect they are running on SharePoint and MapPoint. Paul Bissett put it accurately:
Curious why GOOG aka BORG wants to invade Jack’s $1B pond. It doesn’t move the needle on their $25B business? #where20
– Paul Bissett (@pbissett) April 20, 2011
I still have never really understood what Google Earth Enterprise was/is and this seems like something that will fall into that category. Expensive, secret and used by a couple people you sort of know, but they’ll never show you what they are doing. I doubt Google will be invited to any Esri events anymore though.
Bottom line? You need an enterprise product to talk about so you have something to talk about when talking with enterprise customers.
Google Earth seems to keep bumping around into things trying to figure out why it is here.
Spatially Adjusted 