Google bought Keyhole in 2004, rebranded Earth Viewer as Google Earth in 2005 and, well, you know the rest of the story. ![]() It sold the license to its Earth Viewer software for upwards of $600 annually to businesses and charged consumers $79 annually for a stripped down version of it. The most notable was Keyhole, which launched "Earth Viewer" in 2003 and used Terraserver as some of the underpinning of their technology. "How would these people react to discovering a Microsoft web server with an aerial photo of their house that's so good it shows the kiddie pool in the backyard?" "Some people are paranoid enough about Microsoft," Andy Ihnatko wrote in an article I accessed using LexisNexis. Click on the aerials button in the top left of the viewer. However, you likely came here to view some historic aerial imagery, not to view maps, right To view the aerial view of the current map location, you need to select an aerial year to display. In addition to the Newsweek article, the Chicago Sun Times ran an opinion piece in 2000 that questioned the company's motives with Terraserver. Maps are used for orientation, and we don't deviate from their utility. It may be as simple as Barclay suggested: Microsoft didn't see itself as an information company, and the media was skeptical of its intentions had it decided to become one. Current Microsoft representative declined to be interviewed for this article, and Jim Gray, Barclay's boss, was lost at sea in 2007. It's easy to look at Terraserver as a missed opportunity for Microsoft to dominate the next era of computing, and it's hard to say why, exactly, the company decided to stop pouring resources into it. "There's definitely a little bit of frustration there." "In the science community, this technology took off, but as a business I could never get anyone at Microsoft to latch onto it," Barclay said. "It turns out that 'round Earth, flat monitor' is an enormous pain in the neck," Barclay said. Barclay quickly ran into an age-old cartography problem. He was a database guy-Terraserver was the first website he'd ever made, and it was the first project he'd ever tried that had anything to do with mapping, which proved to be quite a challenge. Gray put Barclay, who Rossmeisl called "the brains of the project" in charge, and he got to coding. The images, along with some from recently declassified Russian military photos, totaled just over 2.3 terabytes. "I thought getting the data on the web was really important, and I wanted to help make it happen." "We had imagery from maybe half of the country done digitally and we had some capabilities to deliver them, but not in a fast, accessible way," Rossmeisl told me. ![]() The Cold War was over, which allowed spy satellite imagery to be declassified, no one was worried about terrorism in a pre-9/11 world, and, well, the average person was beginning to get the internet. We believe that these changes have the potential to eliminate 100 million hard-braking events in routes driven with Google Maps each year, so you can rely on Maps to get you from A to B quickly - but also more safely.The timing was more-or-less perfect. We’ll automatically recommend that route if the ETA is the same or the difference is minimal. With this update, we’ll take the fastest routes and identify which one is likely to reduce your chances of encountering a hard-braking moment. Here’s how it works: Every time you get directions in Maps, we calculate multiple route options to your destination based on several factors, like how many lanes a road has and how direct a route is. Soon, Google Maps will reduce your chances of having hard-braking moments along your drive thanks to help from machine learning and navigation information. According to research from experts at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, these hard-braking moments - incidents along a route that cause a driver to sharply decelerate - can be a leading indicator of car crash likelihood. As you approach a busy intersection, the traffic slows suddenly and you have to slam on your brakes.
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