VentureBeat

Updated

Google’s latest move on maps is impressive, and knocks out Microsoft’s latest effort to spruce up its maps with 3D imagery.

Separately, scared out of the shadows is a Waltham, Mass. start-up, Everyscape, which has a similar offering, but its twist is that it lets you cruise streets, landmarks and even enter buildings. It has a demo of Union Square, in San Francisco, and says a full lunch is planned for fall. It has a high gee-whiz factor, but takes some skill in directing yourself with navigational arrows — sort of learning how of to fly a magic carpet. More on Everyscape in a second, but first back to Google.

Google’s offering is called Street View. Go to Google Maps, select an address, and hit “street view,” and Google renders a 3D image of the street you’re on and surrounding view.

More impressive, it is interactive. Once you get the image (an example is below), you can drag it around, so that the image turns with you — a full 360 degrees. (Try it with the Golden Gate Bridge here). If you want a view of another place, you just take the little person-icon and drag them in the map to your desired location.

Microsoft, while doing something similar, is clunkier. The 360 degree swivel isn’t seamless. You can pick north, south, east and west, and have different screens for each. Still, Microsoft will no doubt scramble again to catch up.

More details on Google’s Street View from Greg Sadetsky: Cities covered so far are Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. It is Flash, can be decompiled using Flare, and a server from Keyhole (a property recently integrated into Google earth) suggests Google Earth may be supported soon.

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EveryScape, meanwhile, lets you do even more. It lets you circulate in a neighborhood and enter stores and restaurants. It provides an on-screen window providing reviews of these locales, from Yelp and elsewhere. Turnhere, another start-up, offers videos of various places, but doesn’t offer the navigational kick provided by EveryScape.

EveryScape wants users submit photos of their favorite places, so that it can offer more than the nine cities where it is launching by the end of the year. It also wants to let visitors share their stories, opinions and reviews about their daily experiences at these places, against the visual backdrops. This is all dangerously close to the direction likely to be taken by Google’s Street View and Google Earth — though Google has yet to prove adept at encouraging user participation around its products.

On EveryScape, someone looking to rent his or her apartment can add a “For Rent” sign and an apartment tour. The beginnings of an ultimate virtual world?

No download is required. EveryScape is Flash-based. The company said the images it uses come from standard digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras, and are uploaded to EveryScape for processing. It says it wants to cover the entire world.

Update: More here from the Mercury News’ Elise Ackerman, about how the latest technologies are shaping up in the competition between Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google Earth.

Google has licensed the sensing technology developed by a team of Stanford University students that enabled Stanley, a robotic car, to win a 131 mile race through the Mojave Desert last year.

The Mercury News’ Elise Ackerman reports that Google will use the sensing technology — which lets the car map out the terrain in front of it so that it can steer and change gears without a person at the wheel — to map out photo-realistic 3-D versions of cities around the world. The move was made, Ackerman suggests, to help Google regain ground it has lost to Microsoft’s 3-D mapping application known as Virtual Earth.

Ackerman does not clearly explain what is so special about the Stanley technology, presumably because that is the secret sauce, and Google officials wouldn’t tell her. Or perhaps Google wanted mainly to hire Sebastian Thrun (pictured above), leader of the Stanley racing team, who will work art-time at Google under the arrangement, and the licensing will let him continue his work under Google’s aegis.

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, available through the 3-D link on maps.live.com uses a mixture of aerial photography, algorithms and computational power to create replicas of more than 50 cities.

Ackerman says more details about the Google-Stanley deal will be released at the Where 2.0 conference May 29 and 30.

(Inset photo courtesy: Stanford News)

Here’s the latest action:

Netvibes offers Netvibes2go — Netvibes, the company that has gotten buzz with its cool personalized home page service, is offering a mobile version called Netvibes2Go. It lets you access all your info — contained in useful modules, including email, calendar, to-do list and any RSS feed — while you’re on the go. To get it, you have to configure your Netvibes account on a PC first (creating a new tab, called “mobile” and then putting in compatible modules). Founder Tariq Krim tells us an announcement will be coming shortly. Was discovered by bloggers.

Check out VentureBeat Newswire for latest stories — They include John Doerr’s latest company (physician software), video-sharing company Fliqz’s latest VC round (surprising, for us), Sequoia’s latest investment (in PopularMedia), secretive home telecom company Ooma’s latest round (from Sean Parker and others) and more.

Google adds real-time traffic to maps in several cities — Cities include San Francisco, New York and others. Image at left is a partial screenshot of what SF traffic looked like at 9:30am this morning. In other words, be glad if you don’t live or work in the East Bay.

Wesabe, personal finance site, raises $700,000 — The Berkeley company that lets you manage your financials, with things like tagging, and then lets you communicate with others about it (apparently, some people want this), raised the cash from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which itself just raised a new fund for hacker-driven companies (see our NewsWire story here, from yesterday). Here’s our earlier story about Wesabe from last year.

Second Life adds voice — You’ve been able to chat via IM before. But now the virtual world company is offering ways to talk with others, taking into account three dimensions to adjust volume, that is, how far away you are from other people (in the room or region where you’re conversing), and what direction you’re facing.

Hyped product of the day: Buzzword – Virtual Ubiquity, a Boston start-up, has created some buzz with its online word processor, BuzzWord. It isn’t out yet, but see here for details. Lots of effusive coverage elsewhere.

Another news ranking site, Spotplex — Techcrunch has a story about the Silicon Valley start-up Spotplex. At Spotplex, news stories aren’t submitted by users. Rather, blog and other news sites wanting to be featured at the site submit some javascript code, and it culls the most popular read articles on those sites, and then features them. We’re not sure how this is going to work, because by default, stories from the most popular sites are going to get read (and thus featured at Spotplex), even if they’re crappy stories. Also, there are other sites that do similar things, such as Topix. The company has accepted VentureBeat as a source. We’ll send in our code and see.

Adobe Systems to release Web version of its Photoshop image-editing application — It will do so within six months.

Invalid clicks on Gooole’s Adwords under 10 percent — Or at least, that is what Google tells us. Google adds that, in general, undetected fraud is less than 0.02 percent. However, there’s just no way for Google to know that for sure.

Latest Silicon Valley round-up:

IPO window opening? — Lots of companies filing to go public lately. In just the past couple of days, there’s WiMax company Clearwire (see our story), game company Glu Mobile (see story), WiFi company Aruba (see story) and now rumors of software company Netsuite preparing one.

Redback Networks comes long way — This San Jose company went big, and then bankrupt in 2003. Now we learn the company, which manages 50 million broadband connections, has been bought by telecommunications equipment maker, Ericsson for $2.1 billion.

Google offers multiple destinations – You’ve probably noticed that Google has improved its directions service on Google Maps. It started storing previous addresses you’ve looked, and now has offered a way to look up multiple destinations in one go. You just hit the “add destination” button (see image below)

U.S. dumps VaxGen — In an unusual dose of tough medicine, the U.S. government canceled its $877.5 million contract with Brisbane’s VaxGen for an improved anthrax vaccine because the company didn’t meet its deadlines. Good overview of the debacle here in the Merc.

Zoho continues its barrage of software offerings, offers Wiki product — We’ve written about this scrappy, low-cost, but impressive software provider before. It has one of the widest arrange of online software products out there, many of them free. It told VentureBeat yesterday that Zoho Wiki is now available. You can create it for public use, or private use among a group. Zoho’s previous weakness was that many of its products weren’t integrated within the same platform, but it has moved to change that lately. The Wiki, for example uses Zoho Writer as the editor, and appears to have most of the other features you’d want (spell check, integration with spreadsheets, immediate syncing when those spreadsheets are changed, YouTube video embedding, RSS for pages). More details here.

Podaddies, yet another advertising start-up — Gigaom reviews San Francisco start-up, Podaddies, which wants to place advertising in user-generated video. We don’t see much new here. It does want to customize the service to each site it serves, but there are others that do that too. It is a self-admitted “tortoise” among many hares.

Milpitas is wired with WiFi — Earthlink announced that its service in Silicon Valley city of Milpitas is now ready for use. However, it is not free. After 30 days free testing, a user must pay $21.95 a month. Occasional users can pay rates ranging from $3.95 for a one-hour pass to $15.95 for a three-day pass.