
Google Imagery: Cost-effective, accurate imagery for your operations - alternize
http://lp.google-mkto.com/Google-imagery.html
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mxfh
37 days from SkyBox acquisition announcement to product offering; well that's
fast.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7874092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7874092)

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narrowingorbits
This is not SkyBox related, but rather aerial. Note the 15cm resolution.

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shubb
At 15cm resolution, I'd say that the high resolution imagery is arial
photographs.

Satellite imagery doesn't get much better than 0.5m because of physics and
govmint[1].

Sxfh refers to skybox. They are very exciting, offering satellite video feeds.
It's important to note that they don't offer global live coverage - as the
satellite flys over the globe, you get a 'strip' of video. So at a given
location, you get a very short period of video, and then the satellite has
moved on and nothing until another one flies over.

To me, drones or balloons would be the only candidates for providing
ubiquitous video coverage of a city for instance (see NPR documentary last
year), but even then, cloud is an issue.

I tend to wonder if the best way of observing a city would be to fuse radar
from multiple satellites to build a live, cloud immune 3D model of the city
surface.

[1]GeoEye hope to achieve 0.34m with GeoEye-2, but will probably only be
allowed to release it at 0.5m.

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bnolsen
you can schedule aircraft so they cover and area when there's a cloud free (or
diminshed) window. Satellites get what they get. For cities like portland
that's typically not good enough.

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ZeroGravitas
Mapbox get good results with their post-processing to remove clouds.

[http://www.wired.com/2013/05/a-cloudless-
atlas](http://www.wired.com/2013/05/a-cloudless-atlas)

I'd be intrigued to see how it would look once you zoom in further to city
scale. Would you see blurs of cars along roads?

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flgb
NearMap is an Australian startup that has a similar product but with higher
resolution and more frequent refreshes. But only operates in Australia now, as
far as I know. [http://nearmap.com](http://nearmap.com)

From Wikipedia: A unique exclusive process of imagery capturing, processing
and publishing is used. Traditionally, high resolution aerial imagery has to
be captured by a low altitude flying aircraft, then the data is manually
processed and stitched together digitally to create a PhotoMap, a slow process
which can take months to complete. nearmap speeds up this process by using
their own engineered camera capture equipment, named a 'HyperPod', which is
attached to Cessna 210 light aircraft, which fly at a high altitude, enabling
entire cities to be captured in a day or two. Once the imagery is captured, it
is processed through super computers which run software known as 'HyperVision'
which automatically processes and stitches together the many individual
photographs captured into one virtually seamless PhotoMap. These PhotoMaps are
then hosted on nearmap's end user web portal, known as 'MapBrowser'. Along
with traditional top-down photography, the HyperPod is also able to capture
oblique aerial photographs from 4 different angles and digital elevation model
data at the same time.

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jqm
I found this a few weeks ago when I needed some satellite images for a
project.

[http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/](http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/)

The resolution is not the quality Google is offering but it worked for what I
was doing. And the price (free) was right.

When I see a "Contact Us" button where the price should be, I'm generally
suspicious the price is more than I want to pay for a small or a hobby
project.

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notatoad
Not only is there a "contact us" link instead of a pricing link, there's a big
banner saying "enterprise" at the top of the page. If ever there was a clue
that something isn't going to be cheap, that would be it.

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ewams
Title is wrong, these are aerial photos - from the linked page: "Google has
global ambitions for our consumer aerial imagery."

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javiramos
Could you photograph the terrain at another part of the light spectrum (i.e.
IR to image through clouds) and stitch the data together?!

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brixon
You can get all kinds of imagery at [http://mapmart.com/](http://mapmart.com/)

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ryanburk
it is really strange that this is hosted on the "google-mkto.com" domain.

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tindrlabs
Did some checking

Enterprise Google+ Account Post:
[https://plus.google.com/117578386194324385666/posts/JTp8HWPJ...](https://plus.google.com/117578386194324385666/posts/JTp8HWPJGbr)

Links to a Blog Post: [http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2014/07/bringing-
google...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2014/07/bringing-google-earth-
images-to-
business.html?utm_campaign=entblog&utm_source=MapsImagery07162014&utm_medium=g-plus)

Links to: [http://lp.google-mkto.com/Google-imagery.html](http://lp.google-
mkto.com/Google-imagery.html)

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bnolsen
sattelites dont commercially provide 6 inch. its all aerial. 1m accuracy is
very poor for things like property boundary checks, etc. Fine for getting to
your destination, however.

