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Aerial Imagery Business Taking Off
posted by Satri
on Tuesday October 10, @09:54AM
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from the is-this-the-expression-of-the-long-tail? dept.
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The Google Earth Blog and APB links to a Newsweek article on the recent boom in aerial imagery business. From the article: "The Internet firms believe these overhead photos will become the building blocks for a new wave of virtual services that will let users navigate 3-D simulations of cities and shop in exact replicas of stores. As a result, scores of decades-old mom-and-pop aerial-mapping firms are suddenly thriving, along with the nation's two major commercial satellite imagery companies. "The geospatial-imaging industry seems to be at the epicenter of a war between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo," says Edward Jurkevics of Chesapeake Analytics Group. "It's a good place to be.""
Related Stories
Application Domains: TeleAtlas Changes Its Data Collection Strategy
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The Map Room and All Points Blog links to a Wired article on TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ data collection strategies. From the article: "Next, GDT acquired detailed aerial photography of major cities. "We could look at a street and see which way cars were parked, even tire rubber going into intersections, and deduce 85 percent of the turn restrictions and one-way attributes," Cooke says. Some state transportation departments offered video footage of their streets to GDT, and Cooke's employees would fast-forward through hours of tape, noting every road sign. Impressed by how much faster and cheaper maps could be updated with this approach, Tele Atlas, a Belgium-based company, bought GDT for $100 million in 2004." On this previous story, we learned Tele Atlas wants to benefit from customer feedback to improve maps.
Aerial Imagery Inspires Industry
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Very Spatial links to a BBC article on how aerial photography has become crucial to everyone from firefighters to real estate tax assessors. From the short article: "It was acts of terrorism and natural disasters that highlighted the usefulness of aerial imagery, along with increased research and spending in the name of Homeland Security. [...] The next generation of aerial photography provides 3D fly-throughs. It is enough to make even the new version of Flight Simulator seem old."
Open Aerial Map
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Open Aerial Map is a non-profit, open access, meeting place for the aerial imaging community. It exists to provide a freely available image map of the world created solely by community contribution, and to facilitate the free exchange of imagery, technology, and ideas. In order to provide an unrestricted, free, an unbiased view of the world, OpenAerialMap encourages the free exchange of aerial imagery, without restriction on its use. More info on thier website at http://openaerialmap.org.
OpenAerialMap Update
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It seems Google's Ed Parsons does not read Slashgeo, otherwise he would have discovered about OpenAerialMap last August, here's his thoughts on the project. There's also an interesting recent entry on the O'Reilly Radar about OpenAerialMap: "Anyone can register as a datasource. You can then upload and geoposition your imagery using the site's tools. Though the project idea has been around for a while it was only recently put together by Chris Schmidt, an OpenLayers (Radar post) contributor and MetaCarta (Radar post) employee. Chris has made the site's code available."
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