NearMap, a geospatial media company bought out by Ipernica this week, claims that its “breakthrough technology enables photomaps to be updated much more frequently than other providers such as Google Earth, which can be many months out of date.”
NearMap’s technology enables very high resolution aerial photomaps with multiple angle views to be created at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions… For the first time, people will be able to see the environment change over time, as NearMap’s online photomaps allow users to move back and forward month by month to see changes occur, such as the construction of a home or development of a new road. [And] with NearMap’s revolutionary approach to high resolution photomaps, it has achieved its objective of a 20-fold operating cost reduction over current industry practices.
Ipernica says that NearMap’s ultimate goal is to cover over 20 percent of the world’s population (700 cities) with photomaps updated at least on a monthly basis.According to Ipernica, NearMap has fully automated the process of creating very high definition photomaps and has developed a complete chain of technologies to address these challenging requirements.
If NearMap (or a competing company) broadens its scope to rural populations, the technology could be a particularly useful tool for the purposes of data collection and crisis mapping.
iRevolutions 