Google Earth displays satellite images of varying resolution of the Earth's surface, allowing users to visually see things like cities and houses looking perpendicularly down or at an oblique angle, with perspective (see also bird's eye view). 2.1 Wikipedia and Panoramio integrationĪ rendering of the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado by Google Earth.The release of Google Earth in June 2005 to the public caused a more than tenfold increase in media coverage on virtual globes between 20, driving public interest in geospatial technologies and applications. In addition to releasing an updated Keyhole based client, Google also added the imagery from the Earth database to their web-based mapping software. It was also made available on the iPhone OS on October 27 2008, as a free download from the App Store. Google Earth is also available as a browser plug-in (released on June 2, 2008) for Firefox 3, Safari 3, IE6 and IE7. The product, re-released as Google Earth in 2005, is currently available for use on personal computers running Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above, Linux (released on June 12, 2006), and FreeBSD. It is available under three different licenses: Google Earth, a free version with limited functionality Google Earth Plus (discontinued), which included additional features and Google Earth Pro ($400 per year), which is intended for commercial use. It maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS 3D globe. Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographic information program that was originally called Earth Viewer, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a company acquired by Google in 2004. Google bought Keyhole in 2004, rebranded Earth Viewer as Google Earth in 2005 and, well, you know the rest of the story.Windows 2000, XP & Vista, Mac OS X, iPhone OS, Linuxġ0 MB (8.9 MB iPhone 24 MB Linux 35 MB Mac ) It sold the license to its Earth Viewer software for upwards of $600 annually to businesses and charged consumers $79 annually for a stripped down version of it. The most notable was Keyhole, which launched "Earth Viewer" in 2003 and used Terraserver as some of the underpinning of their technology. "How would these people react to discovering a Microsoft web server with an aerial photo of their house that's so good it shows the kiddie pool in the backyard?" "Some people are paranoid enough about Microsoft," Andy Ihnatko wrote in an article I accessed using LexisNexis. In addition to the Newsweek article, the Chicago Sun Times ran an opinion piece in 2000 that questioned the company's motives with Terraserver. It may be as simple as Barclay suggested: Microsoft didn't see itself as an information company, and the media was skeptical of its intentions had it decided to become one. Current Microsoft representative declined to be interviewed for this article, and Jim Gray, Barclay's boss, was lost at sea in 2007. It's easy to look at Terraserver as a missed opportunity for Microsoft to dominate the next era of computing, and it's hard to say why, exactly, the company decided to stop pouring resources into it. "There's definitely a little bit of frustration there." "In the science community, this technology took off, but as a business I could never get anyone at Microsoft to latch onto it," Barclay said. "It turns out that 'round Earth, flat monitor' is an enormous pain in the neck," Barclay said. Barclay quickly ran into an age-old cartography problem. He was a database guy-Terraserver was the first website he'd ever made, and it was the first project he'd ever tried that had anything to do with mapping, which proved to be quite a challenge. Gray put Barclay, who Rossmeisl called "the brains of the project" in charge, and he got to coding. The images, along with some from recently declassified Russian military photos, totaled just over 2.3 terabytes. "I thought getting the data on the web was really important, and I wanted to help make it happen." "We had imagery from maybe half of the country done digitally and we had some capabilities to deliver them, but not in a fast, accessible way," Rossmeisl told me. The Cold War was over, which allowed spy satellite imagery to be declassified, no one was worried about terrorism in a pre-9/11 world, and, well, the average person was beginning to get the internet.
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