Virtual Italia 3D
How I love competition. Windows Live Spaces announces that Virtual Earth now has all of Italy in high resolution, beating Google to the punch. No doubt, this is a direct result of the deal with Norway's Blom (blogged here) a company that has quite an inventory of Italy imagery (and which provided the bird's eye views over several Italians cities released last week.)
Something caught my eye: The third-party imagery used by Microsoft for Virtual Earth does not come with copyright statements from contributing companies — all it says is "© 2006 Microsoft Corporation". I wonder if this costs a lot more? Remember, too that the Blom agreement allowed for its imagery to be used at work — there is no constraint on using Microsoft's Virtual Earth 3D at the office. I'm guessing that Microsoft is paying handsomely for all this "smoothness".
With Google's purchase of Endoxon yesterday, it really seems like the battle for Europe is heating up between these two giants.
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I've just had a look at the imagesfor Milano and surroundings. They are quite old; three to four years old at least.
Posted by: Felice at 23:22 UTC, December 19, 2006
www.birdseyetourist.com has a great collection of Bird's eye imagery including some new Italian ones.
Posted by: Tim at 0:16 UTC, December 20, 2006
Hi Stefan - In Italy, we have also had local search of businesses for some time now. as with the US, UK, and all of the other places where we have data to support local search, you can have up to three auto updating queries open at once like this:
regards,
steve
Posted by: steve lombardi at 4:46 UTC, December 20, 2006
Microsoft also lets World Wind use their imagery and maps, something that google's lawyers gave the thumbs-down to.
Posted by: Erik at 14:41 UTC, December 20, 2006
great area of italy im going in 3 days !!
Posted by: james davis at 18:03 UTC, October 05, 2008
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