Round the world in 80 clicks

Let’s have a look at the newest (well, this week’s, that is) creature to emerge from the Google Labs, only this time it’s not coming straight out of Googleplex, but rather the result of an acquisition.

We had tested Keyhole (as the independent company was then called) a few months before its acquisition by search engine giant Google, finding it a really cool piece of software whose usefulness was limited.

We now complete our review by looking at Google Earth; in line with the commercial strategy of Brin&Page, the product is now essentially free; you download a small client which you install painlessly on your machine, and which connects with a database of humongous proportions pulling torrents of streamed geolocalized data as you move around the globe.

First of all there are pictures taken by geostationary satellites: they cover the whole globe, but at rather dramatically different resolutions: you can make out the tourist at the foot of the statue of Liberty, but the Cerro Torre, perhaps the most dramatic mountain in the Hielo Patagonico del Sur is not even a bump in the textured image representing the area. The thirteen “eightthousands” fare a little better and actually you can fly from the Nanga Parbat to the Kanchenjunga and then around any or all of these majestic mountains.

Of course none of the data is live, which means I cannot check if the car I parked outside the office is still there, which is actually good for appeasing privacy advocates, although the company has taken some flak for obscuring the White House but not, for example, the Bundestag or Buckingham Palace.

Then you have a layer of topographic data: street names, notable locations names, etc.. Very useful when planning your route, but frankly very little value added over a standard navigational map you will find in any portable or on-board GPS system.

Finally there is layer containing a 3D models of buildings – albeit it’s only available for selected big US cities, it is nonetheless impressive as it allows you to view an address not only in map mode, but also “sideways”. The illusion of flying among the highrisers downtown New York or Boston is cool, but, we suspect, of limited business value.

The company says the software is being used by real estate developers to present properties – possible, although it does not really add information, but just tons of Wow! factor to an otherwise dull Powerpoint; my own experience of realtors is however rather discouraging as most don’t even have CD based portfolios for what they sell; having said that, the business acumen of Google is not to be easily dismissed and

Maybe I should start buying million dollar houses…