Geospatial new-comer Earthmine to use Nasa mapping technology

With the Crunchies just a couple of weeks away, we’ve covered most the contenders on this site, with a few exceptions. One is Earthmine, a nominee in the Best Technology Innovation/Achievement category.

The company is building a geospatial platform that will integrate with web applications to give them access to a database of in-depth 3D data on a selection of major metropolitan areas. The product is expected to target government agencies, builders, and others involved in urban planning. A beta of the product is set for release in February.

The Berkeley-based company has some tough competition. Google has already released StreetView with the help of a satellite partnership with NASA, while Microsoft had gained early ground and attention with its Virtual Earth program. 

However, Earthmine says it’s inked an exclusive agreement with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),  trading an equity stake in Earthmine for an exclusive license to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) software–the same software used on the Mars Exploration Rover Missions–which stands to give the company a significant technological advantage over the competition.

Earthmine’s competitors have not been without partnership, but it remains to be seen how they’ll be able to match this kind of technology. We’re trying to contact Caltech to find out just how exclusive this exclusive agreement is likely to remain, but haven’t heard back yet.

The first version of Earthmine’s product, demoed here, has very easy to use point, click, and go browsing capabilites, while Google StreetView and other competitive products (see below) only allow zooming because their environments are based primarily on video and satellite imaging. In addition, Earthmine cleverly combines Google Maps’ renowned bird’s eye view as a browser-in-browser feature (like the picture-in-picture option many people use on TV to watch sporting events), so while immersed in the 3D world, the minimized browser (with the bird’s eye view) shows and allows quick access for movement in the 3D map.

As the demo shows, the measurement tool can measure varying objects such as the width and height of a window, the breadth of a street, or the height of a tall building.

Co-founders John Ristevski and Anthony Fassero envision an accurate 3D model of the real world where the user has tools to interact with the mapped city (San Francisco is currently the only city available, but the company plans to have the top 50 U.S. cities mapped in the next few years). Construction companies, city government offices, and other users can point and click for accurate real-world measurements, create tags to mark points of interest, and capture and export screen shots.

The company, which has raised $1.2 million through family and friends, uses “reality indexing” software to create a geospatial data mine of urban environments using three-dimensional, high resolution panoramic images collected from their SUV-mounted camera setup. The technology Earthmine licensed from Caltech uses algorithms to extrapolate data from these wide-angle stereo cameras.

Earthmine is still looking for additional capital, and it remains to be seen how they’ll generate revenue. Fassero suggests they’ll offer an API on their software platform and allow city governments to integrate their geographical systems and databases with Earthmine.

Earthmine is one of the latest geospatial players to hit the scene. Several other mapping companies we covered in the past have been quicker to the punch, including Upnext, which has already released Facebook applications featuring its rendering technology (and received equal praise and heat from TechCrunch ), and Geosemble, which lets clients import data such as addresses to map out physical locations. One competitor, Everyscape, has already launched in seven U.S. cities, from Boston, MA all the way to sunny Laguna Beach, CA.

So the race is on to see who can quickly map the most cities and monetize their product.

Geosemble, for combining lots of data with maps

Combining satellite imagery with maps and other data has become very fertile ground lately, illustrated by two recent products from Geosemble and Google.

First, Google just introduced a way for you to edit the location of your (or others’) houses and businesses in Google Maps (image below).

That service could be valuable to a small business owner who wants to clarify that their business is located next to the street, not actually in the street. But what if you’re a small business owner — say, a home remodeler — and you want to use a map to figure out where all of your potential customers are?

Enter Geosemble, which offers a separate product: It lets you import large amounts of data — using for example an Excel sheet with all of your clients addresses — to map out the physical location of each address within a visual map created using satellite images.

You can import anything from telephone directories to publicly available tax data to lists of news articles about a city. Geosemble can provide you exact physical information, such as the size of a swimming pool or an open area of somebody’s yard. You can search for locations based on zip code, city, county, the property value of people’s homes and other information from within the site.

To start using the service, you’ll need to contact the company here.

It’s not hard to think of uses for Geosemble. Example: A company that builds offices for people’s home could take publicly available databases of people who have incorporated sole proprietorship businesses, and then locate on a satellite map which of them have space for an office addition. Such targeting would be more efficient than scanning publicly available online maps, poring over your own Excel sheets, and going door-to-door to figure out potential customers.

Of course, Google Maps For Enterprise also lets businesses overlay their own data on top of its maps. Like Geosemble, that service costs money. Geosemble is competing to process more data and provide more precise results faster and more cheaply than Google or any other mapping company.

Geosemble has its government allies: Together with the University of Southern California engineering school, it has continued to receive grants from various agencies.

In August, DARPA awarded Geosemble and USC a grant to develop a way to link online news articles, videos and audio data with maps so you can see news items for any satellite image coordinates in the world. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, funded a related project where Geosemble and USC will summarize local information and display it in compact labels and captions. The US Air Force Office of Scientific Research has provided money to basically duplicate Google Maps’ own overlay of map data and satellite images. The National Science Foundation has also awarded Geosemble a small-business grant, to help Geosemble build out the commercial services mentioned earlier.

Geosemble is a partially-owned subsidary of Fetch Technologies, a data services company that also grew out of collaborations between USC researchers and the government.

Meanwhile, below is a Flash demo of how Google’s new maps “edit” tool works (RSS readers will have to visit site).

Google Maps Street View Heads Overseas

Posted: 22 Nov 2007 09:14 PM CST

Google’s occasionally controversial Street View product is heading outside of the United States.

Google Street View cars have been spotted in the United Kingdom in September and in Canada, where the privacy aspects of Google capturing street images resulted in a lot of talk as to whether it was legal or not to walk down the a street in Toronto, take a picture and post it on the internet.

Australia looks likely to be the 4th Google territory with a Google Street View car spotted in Sydney, according to the SMH. Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin confirmed the sighting, saying that the images taken will be added to Google Maps some time next year.

The Street View program has not been without its critics in the United States as well, particularly when Google has shown pictures of people entering adult book stores and doing other things they’d rather not have on the internet.

Google Maps Street View competes with Microsoft’s Streetside and startup Everyscape, the latter also taking pictures inside of buildings as well as from the outside.

UpNext: Wicked 3D Maps of NYC on Facebook

Posted: 21 Nov 2007 02:36 PM CST

When it comes to online maps, there is a gap between the 2-D maps and pictures you see on Google Maps, Live Maps, and Yahoo Maps, and the more fully-immersive, fly-through experiences of Google Earth and Virtual Earth. A small four-person startup in New York City called UpNext is trying to bridge that gap, by bringing extremely detailed, 3-D maps to the browser.

UpNext only maps Manhattan right now (they hope to add Boston and San Francisco next spring), but it is a powerful demonstration of how 3-D experiences could soon become more mainstream. (No download is necessary, but you do need Java 1.5—and be warned that older Macs might have some issues with it). I met UpNext chief architect Raj Advani last week at our Boston MeetUp, and he came by today with CEO Danny Moon to show me the site and its new Facebook app.

Yesterday, UpNext launched its map on Facebook, although it is not yet in the app directory. (Unlike many Facebook apps, it is not a subset of the main site’s functionality. You can do everything inside Facebook you can on UpNext.com.) UpNext is a complete 3-D representation of the city, down to practically every single building. You can pan and zoom, and click on any building to get a list of the businesses inside. Type in an address and the map flies right to it. If you want to see nearby restaurants, bars, stores, hotels, museums, or sports facilities, you can set a filter to light those things up on the map. This building-by-building and category search “is something you cannot do on Google Maps,” claims Moon.

For many businesses, UpNext pulls in ratings and reviews from other sites like CitySearch, the New York Times, and Time Out. And you can add your own reviews, and look at all the places your friends on UpNext have rated, reviewed, and visited. That now includes all your New York City Facebook friends, whom you can import into the main site as well. They pop down in a friend slider that lets you sort through them and all the places they’ve rated.

UpNext gets its map data from VisionMedia, which flies over the city taking pictures and then extrapolates the height of each building, allowing UpNext to render them in 3-D. It then takes local business information from Localeze, and drops it onto every building (which is geocoded using data from the City of New York). “We want to reach a new level of detail in immersive search,” says Advani, “so I can see at a glance where things are happening.” He’s even added day and night cycles to the map.

All of this would not be possible using Ajax or even Flash, says Advani. Only Java lets UpNext tap into the video acceleration card on your PC to render the polygons fast enough. The trick is to compress each building, rendering it with as few polygons as possible. There is some lag time while you are waiting for Java to load, but that should be fixed in an update to Java coming in about three months.

And what about a mobile version? Advani is thinking of entering the $10 million Android contest sponsored by Google for its new mobile operating system. And of course, he would develop for the iPhone in a second if Apple “would tell us some details about their API.”

UpNext is a real Bootstrap funding operation. The four employees put in $50,000 and pulled together another $45,000 from friends and family, which was enough to create the map of New York City. Now they want to raise about $1 million to expand to other cities. In terms of making money, at some point they will turn on local search ads as well as in-map ads where buildings light up during certain searches (like for “shoes”). Moon also envisions creatiev banner ads linked to the map. “If Starbucks is launching a new drink,” he suggetss, “all the Starbucks could light up if you click on the ad.” Local business Yellow Pages-type ads are another natural fit.

In reality, though, UpNext is a technology demo waiting to be picked up by a larger company building out a global mapping platform. It cannot survive as a standalone company given the competition. Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft should buy these guys and blow out these maps worldwide.