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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.'"

5 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?" `":" #");}
  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. 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.