Google has a knack of taking something prosaic – such as email – and redefining the category. That's the case with its mapping products.
This week, Google announced an upgrade to its ultra-cool mapping product, Google Earth. In fact, the announcement came at the company's inaugural Geo Developer Day.
In just a year, Google Earth has had over 100 million downloads. Well, expect the downloads to increase again – since Google Earth has key enhancements. There is four times as much coverage of land (about a third of the world's population can see their homes from a satellite view). What's more, there has been a 4x increase in the resolution of the graphics.
The product has a more intuitive interface. There is also a version in German, Spanish, French and Italian.
There is also a MySpace kind of site called Google Earth Community. Here, it allows "participatory mapping," where users can add comments to maps.
I interviewed Frank Taylor, who has the Google Earth Blog. According to him:
"For developers, Google has release KML V2.1 which supports many new features allowing even better integration between databases and server applications to provide more valuable and sophisticated visualizations through Google Earth."
OK, so it's all neat stuff, right? But, what is the business model? After all, the product still does not have ads.
Well, Google is making an attempt to monetize: that is, there is a enterprise version. Customers can license the technology at fees starting at $10,000.
Who knows, this may be a model for other free Google products.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-15-2006 @ 8:38AM
Ivan said...
This article surprises me a bit. Google is all web (exception being Picasa) and yet they have this client side download product. This product is more novelty than anything else. I'm sure there is a business use for it but seems a bit limited considering that both Yahoo! and Google have their map APIs available to the general public. Why wouldn't you just develop a easy to access Web-based "product" with most of the same tools as Earth?
And what did Gmail really do for email? I have a Gmail account as a "dummy" account for spam and sites like this one. Nothing functional.