• Rival to Google Earth Launched?

    Rival to Google Earth Launched?

    Techtree News Staff, Jun 26, 2006 1454 hrs IST

    France has launched a new Web site coined, "Geoportal," which claims to be a look-alike of Google Earth.

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France has launched a new Web site coined, "Geoportal," which claims to be a look-alike of Google Earth.

"Geoportal" will reportedly offer high-resolution aerial imagery of locations, and allow users to zoom-in on areas at a resolution of near 50cm (20 inches) to that on the ground.

Speaking at the launch of Geoportal (www.geoportail.fr), the President of France, Jacques Chirac, said that this is a first-of-its-kind free service in Europe, and a step-forward for all citizens since it places France at the forefront of new technologies.

The new service is being considered a rival to Google Earth, Google's popular service that lets users pick specific locations around-the-globe, and then zoom-in on them for greater detail. However, unlike Google Earth that offers high resolution only for certain areas, "Geoportal" promises to cover the whole of mainland France along with its territories.

"Geoportal," an approximately six-million Euro ($ 7.5million) project being developed by the state-owned National Geographic Institute (IGN), will offer users aerial views of a site besides detailed maps, charts, and geological data. It is a compilation of 400,000 aerial photographs to be updated every five years by the IGN, as well as 3,700 maps with certain sensitive zones blurred-out.

The service aims at replicating the success of Google Earth that was launched an year ago, and that has reportedly been downloaded by around 100 million users so far.

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Discussion Board
(7) Comments
nagendra
,raipur, on Oct 12, 2006 11:34 AM
raipur arith
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nagendra
,raipur, on Oct 12, 2006 11:31 AM
give me the earth in raipur
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nagendra
,raipur, on Oct 12, 2006 11:33 AM
raipurarith
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Mike
,Aurora, on Jun 30, 2006 09:14 PM
What kills me is that it is a service like Google *maps* - not Google *Earth*. You can't tilt the view on geoportail. And seriously, what good is zooming to 50cm of the ground? And what in GE prevents you from doing that?
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vicky_a
,mumbai, on Jun 26, 2006 08:27 PM
That is really good, I mean a new company trying to challenge a company like Google ..AWESOME GUTS i must say Aerial view of things at a resolution of just 20 inches, they defenetly gonna go big awy
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Zombie
,Zombie, on Jun 26, 2006 04:37 PM
How can be Geoportal rival to Google? Geoportal has detailed map of Franc not entire world. Visit their site and you can see that TT people tries to exaggerate the news all the time.
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Jessica
,Washington, DC, on Jun 26, 2006 04:32 PM
It amazes me that when a new company launches a service that they claim rivals one of the really big names like Google, that they forget to make sure that they have enough capacity (bandwidth and server resources) to cope with the load. My guess is that this service will end up on the "Might have been" list. Rather launch with way too much capacity and then scale it back once you know how much traffic you're expecting.
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