obvious musings
Thursday, October 28, 2004
KeyHole, taking you on a magic carpet ride !
Google has just bought a company called KeyHole !
I went ahead and downloaded their trial version. It's pretty neat. They have thousands of satellite images for key metropolitan areas around the world. The real cool part about the software however, is how it literally zooms in to the address you type in and you feel like you are on a magic carpet ala' Alladin, flying from one point to another, all over the world! I "flew" from my address in Boston to the city I grew up in, Hyderabad in India. It was so cool, zooming over the Atlantic, North Africa, Arabian sea and finally to Hyderabad.
Apart from this it would seem to be pretty similar to Mapquest, however it uses *real* satellite photos not vectored lines.
My guess is that Google will use it for local searches, also adding points of interest around the address queried (like the pizza places near my place, below shown as forks). To show you what I am talking about, and to see the difference, see below a keynote picture of the same address as compared to how it looks on mapquest. It doesnt have any routing capabilities though, yet !
(click image to enlarge)
Btw, the Reason magazine for the June issue had on its cover the satellite image of every subscribers own address :).
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Update : Terafly also has a similar web enabled service ! Try it here.
Also read this article on Why Google bought KeyHole.
"I can open your eyes
Take you wonder by wonder
Over, sideways and under
On a magic carpet ride"
(A whole new world , Alladin)
I went ahead and downloaded their trial version. It's pretty neat. They have thousands of satellite images for key metropolitan areas around the world. The real cool part about the software however, is how it literally zooms in to the address you type in and you feel like you are on a magic carpet ala' Alladin, flying from one point to another, all over the world! I "flew" from my address in Boston to the city I grew up in, Hyderabad in India. It was so cool, zooming over the Atlantic, North Africa, Arabian sea and finally to Hyderabad.
Apart from this it would seem to be pretty similar to Mapquest, however it uses *real* satellite photos not vectored lines.
My guess is that Google will use it for local searches, also adding points of interest around the address queried (like the pizza places near my place, below shown as forks). To show you what I am talking about, and to see the difference, see below a keynote picture of the same address as compared to how it looks on mapquest. It doesnt have any routing capabilities though, yet !
(click image to enlarge)
Btw, the Reason magazine for the June issue had on its cover the satellite image of every subscribers own address :).
¶ permalink 0 comments
