Category: Search

Keyhole bought by Google for 3D mapping

Moving ever closer to its dream of being able to catalogue almost everything in the world, Google Inc. has just bought digital map-maker, Keyhole Corp.

Google had already recently acquired Picasa, a service that helps manage digital photos, but Keyhole is the first it has acquired since its August initial public offering. All of Keyhole’s 29 employees have joined Google, and its current customer base of about 10,000 come mainly from a coterie of government agencies.
 
Claiming to be the largest 3D, commercial imagery depository online, Keyhole, founded in 2001, maintains a multi-terabyte database of digital images of geographic locations captured from satellites and aeroplanes.  Its 3-D technology provides far-away or close-up views of a region, neighbourhood or specific address. Images can be tilted into different positions, and its image resolution in some areas is as fine as half a foot. We previously saw Keyhole’s 3-D maps being used to zero in on the battlefront on CNN news during the early days of the Iraq war.

Keyhole received its initial financing from Sony Broadband but then raised additional money last year from In-Q-Tel, a venture capital company backed, interestingly, by the CIA.

The Keyhole database includes thousands of cities, and images varying in age from two months to three years. It gets these images from a variety of sources, including the private Colorado satellite companies DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging, while some lower-resolution images come from the U.S. government.

One of the first things Google did after the buyout, was slash the price of Keyhole 2 LT, the basic consumer downloadable software by a whooping 57%, reducing it from $70 (~£38) to $30 (~£16). The more sophisticated Keyhole 2 Pro is priced at $599 (~£327).

Yahoo and MSN already provide online mapping services, enabling users to zoom down to street-level scale, while Mapquest is a popular and established site for directions. Now Google users will no longer have to leave the Google site to avail of this type of service. 

We wait with bated breath to see the uses Google put it to.

Keyhole
Google

Google’s Profit Growth Continues

Anyone who was concerned that Internet search giant Google would be hampered by going public in August can breathe easy as Google announces, in its first financial results since floating on the stock market, that its profits have more than doubled.

They have posted third quarter net profits of $52m (£30m), up from $20.4m in the previous year, and its share price has now surged more than 90% since its initial float.
 
Not bad for a company, which was started in a garage by two students and overtook the established search engine giants Yahoo! and Microsoft to become the most popular search engine in the world.  If only so many rock bands who started life in that same auspicious incubator could have done so well.

Many have argued that Google is an advertising company, not a search company. As Google strength as a search tool has surged, so has their income from advertising. Demand for their paid-for search text-ads, where advertisers are increasingly willing to pay high prices to have their site listed along side search results in the knowledge that they only have to pay if a potential customer clicks on their link. The move to putting their advert on many other sites, targeting them closely to the pages content by automatically understanding what the page was about, significantly increasing their reach.

Google hasn’t rested on their advertising laurels, have now moved into email, a core business for its rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft, and it also operates a comparison-shopping search engine called Froogle, which recently launched in the UK. It’s not stop there – it also recently announced a test of a new desktop search product in the US that allows people to search Google using mobile telephone text messages in an ongoing game of chess where they are trying to anticipate what a rival like Microsoft will do.  

Personally, I get nervous when ‘the suits’ move in on previously laid-back but remarkably successful technology companies. Google and rival Yahoo each get a significant portion of their revenue from the lucrative Web search advertisements, and while some analysts predict that growth in this area will slow down in coming years, its hard to predict where Google will end up if this potential difficulty is realised.

Google

Autonomy to buy Virage

Autonomy have announced that they will be buying video and audio search company, Virage. They plan to pay $1.10 per share, valuing Virage at around $24.8 million, but given Virage’s expected cash balance of $11.5m, Autonomy are only really paying $13.5m – around $0.60/share. It’s not surprisingly this is a far cry from the head days of Jul 2000 when they peaked at $26 a share.

Virage has been around since 1995 when they starting off by offering the indexing of video content. Users were initially able to search for words spoken during a video, which was later expanded to include close captions text, and later on, even the ability to find instances of a person from a library of user-defined faces. They went on to expanded their offering to include streaming encoding and Webcasting services.

Their offering was always thought of as a bit hollow, but their profile always remained high, backed up with a huge spend on marketing. It appears that this formula has continued as total year revenues to March 2003 were $12.9 million and its net loss was $18.1 million.

Autonomy say their are primarily buying them for their customer base.