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Google Acquires Keyhole Corp.

Posted by timothy on from the combine-with-maps-service-please dept.

telstar writes "As part of their ever-expanding online presence, Google has acquired online map provider Keyhole Corp.. Keyhole's technology allows users to perform virtual flyovers of satellite imagery of the earth's surface. The immediate impact of this acquisition is a price drop in Keyhole's service charge. Beyond that, Google does 'not have any announced plans regarding how this technology will integrate with our current products and services.'"

11 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. What about Worldwind? by Nuskrad · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can get similar images from the NASA Worldwind software for free, although they need to fix their servers after the massive slashdotting they got.

    1. Re:What about Worldwind? by cmallinson · · Score: 4, Informative
      You can get similar images from the NASA Worldwind software for free, although they need to fix their servers after the massive slashdotting they got.

      I've tried both services within the last week, and although I was impressed with NASA'a Worldwine, Keyhole 2 kicks its ass in a big way. The street name overlay and colour images make it so much easier to use.

    2. Re:What about Worldwind? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Informative
      You can still use World Wind if you select TerraServer as your imagery source instead of NASA. It truly is an awesome program and everyone even remotely interested in this should check it out.

      World Wind is here. Just be sure to deselect "Landsat 7" from the toolbar (this uses NASA servers that are out of commission) and select "USGS-1m" instead for 1m resolution for the US. For some urban areas you can get much higher resolution and color by going into the "Layer Manager" under Images->High Resolution Terrain Mapped Imagery and selecting "USGS Urban Aera Ortho-Imagery". The topo maps are cool too.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    3. Re:What about Worldwind? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Perhaps, but Keyhole's software trounces NASA eaisily due to the fact that keyhole uses a multitude of services that do flyovers of cities so you can even make out cars (couple years between updates though).

  2. Sweet! by shdragon · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have a subscription for Keyhole. It was $35 for a year subscription, so a drop in price is welcome. The max speed I've EVER gotten off their server is 36k. Lag is especially horrible during the day. Hopefully this will mean an increase in speed & responsiveness.

    --
    "...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
  3. Better, Free, Open source solutions available by netsavior · · Score: 2, Informative

    why use keyhole when NASA has a FREE and open source solution, which looks very similar WorldWind

    of course it only runs on windows... Open Source.Net

    it may not be as geared toward streetmaps, but I have found it useful for finding back roads and stuff.

  4. switzerland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://map.search.ch/ is a swiss map server with aerial photos, completely web based. client side, it is pure javascript and seems to work well on non-IE browsers, too.

  5. Now maybe they'll fix the copy protection by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative
    If you try to upgrade from a 30-day demo version of Keyhole to a pay version by uninstalling the demo, buying a real, but different, version, and installing, you end up in a copy protection hell. Somewhere, Keyhole has stored that you've previously had a demo version, and the real version doesn't deal with that properly.

    Never did get it working on that machine; had to get a refund from Keyhole.

  6. Keyhole - Imagery Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Keyhole comes from a military program for Satellite Imager used in hte Intelligence field.

  7. As if! by quarkscat · · Score: 2, Informative

    Cyberstalking only works with realtime
    data. The real KeyHole's (KH-9, etc.)
    are all owned by NSA. You be dreamin'.

  8. Back On Topic by ComputerSherpa · · Score: 2, Informative
    I bought a one-year subscription to Keyhole NV for 30 bucks about a month ago. (End-of-month sale.) I've been absolutely thrilled with their service-- nothing provokes the "what a freaking awesome program" response (or the "wow, are you a stalker?" response) like asking someone for their address and then zooming in on their house from space. Then double-clicking on an item from the sidebar and hurtling across the continent to a shot of my dorm. I got my money's worth real fast.

    The only thing Keyhole lacks--well, besides a few more hi-res areas--is a path-finding function. There's a nice little distance-calculating function, but it's as-the-crow-flies. Keyhole will show you the streets, but it can't navigate you through them. I expect Google will change that.

    And regarding the rampant speculation on Google's possibly-evil future: Google has earned my trust in a way no other company, online or otherwise, has. Throughout their history, they've shown altruism, and proven that it works. (One wishes more companies would follow their example.) It is entirely possible that Google will turn on us at some point in the future, but until they do, I will continue to trust them and use Google as my search engine exclusively.

    Google has a spotless record so far. Until they act otherwise, I see no reason to assume they'll go bad.

    --
    Information wants to be anthropomorphized!