Intergraph CTO Peter Batty spoke at an event in New Zealand and gets a writeup in Stuff.co.nz. The message: Adapt to mass market rivals like Google Earth or die.

[Batty] said GIS products from established vendors now offer more than most users need. Many customers will opt for cheaper alternatives such as Google Earth and Microsoft’s MSN Virtual Earth.

I don’t see how anyone can do any kind of GIS with MSN Virtual Earth. That aside, he should instead have mentioned ESRI’s upcoming ArcGIS Explorer, but doesn’t, at least not in the article. Batty does promote the use of Google Earth, presumably as a viewer of Intergraph-produced data:

It’s also critical, he says, for Intergraph’s software to be able to slot in to free and low-cost mapping software such as Google Earth, using a “plug and play” approach.

Great, except that an exhaustive search of Intergraph’s site does not bring up one mention of Google Earth, KML or KMZ. Which means Intergraph is a laggard, not a leader, in embracing said new mass market rivals, certainly when compared to ESRI, SketchUp, Maya, Ambercore…

ESRI offering free GIS analysis tools in ArcGIS Explorer is a clever move, akin to how IBM open-sources its more basic and previous-generation technologies to prevent rivals from making money on low-end solutions. Perhaps this explains why, as the article explains, “Mr Batty sees Intergraph’s own future in developing applications for niche verticals such as defence, government and emergency services.”

The latest state of play seems to be the following, cobbled together from various local sources:

Last week, Question Hour in India’s parliament included a question on space imaging, and it prompted an oral supplementary question (procedural definition at #56) that seems to have been reported nearly verbatim here:

New Delhi, Mar 09: The government today said it has taken up with Google Earth the issue of the country’s high security areas and installations being mapped by the agency’s satellites and their pictures put on its internet site.

“Defence ministry and the Ministry of Science and Technology are in touch with the agency over the issue,” Minister of State in the PMO Prithviraj Chauhan told the Rajya Sabha while replying to supplementaries.

When asked whether the government was doing something to ban organisations that were taking high resolution pictures of the country’s secured areas, he said the question should be addressed to the defence ministry.

(“Google Earth Agency.” Has a nice ring to it. Getting closer to the CIC all the time, what with those satellites and all:-)

The government’s response to the supplementary questions was interpreted variously, depending on whom you read, but the gist of it seems to be that the government has promised to, on the one hand, draw up a list of sensitive sites it would like censored, while at the same time investigate technical solutions that could impose censorship unilaterally on the data displayed by Google Earth and Maps inside India, should Google not play along sufficiently.

The options, then, for India:

1. Get Google to blur sites on the Indian government’s list, globally.
   This would be the simplest solution technically, and also the most noxious censorshipwise. Possible coercive tactics: Prosecuting or banning Google’s Indian operations for breaking Indian law, which prohibits local GIS companies from publishing maps or imagery of India’s “sensitive” sites.
2. Get Google to blur sites at India’s request for Indian IP addresses.
   “The Chinese solution.” This should be something that Google can implement, and it might blunt resulting criticism in the west in that it wouldn’t degrade the viewing by those outside India. It might also place Google within the letter of Indian law, though absurdly so, as India’s putative enemies would now have full access to high resolution imagery whereas Indian citizens would not.
3. Blur Google’s images without Google’s consent or cooperation inside India.
   If you are China and have ironclad control on what enters and leaves your country via the internet, then you will likely have an easy time intercepting specific tiles for Google Maps (as they have unique URLs). As for Google Earth, the content stream to the client looks far more complicated to disentangle, and here is where the challenge would lie.

   But India doesn’t have filters on all its nodes to the rest of the internet, as far as I know, so this selective filtering would be impossible. A far cruder solution might be instructing all Indian servers to not honor any request for data coming from Google’s map and image servers, effectively shutting those services down for those in India.

4. Blur Google’s images without Google’s consent or cooperation, globally.
   Impossible, obviously.

(Of course, if option 1 is implemented, it will be clear to everyone precisely which sites are considered the most vulnerable by India’s intelligence establishment, and in no time at all the publicly available high resolution images of these areas will be collected and turned into overlays ready for download from places like Google Earth Community and Google Earth Hacks. These will be usable by all, inside and outside of India.)

What are Google’s options?

In the US; Google has consistently sided with the individual (its main customer) when it comes to disputes with the government. In China, however, it has decided that censored search is better than broken search, especially if it means access to a huge market. Might Google reach the same conclusion regarding mapping if India figures out a way to pull the plug on Google Earth inside India, and threatens to do so?

Google PR’s response has been:

Google takes governmental concerns about Google Earth and Google Maps very seriously. Google welcomes dialogue with governments, and we will be happy to talk to Indian authorities about any concerns they may have. (Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Google)

…which is PRese for saying nothing at all. Last month, however, this apparently of-the-cuff remark was attributed to Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Google’s vice president for Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations:

“The market in India is changing rapidly,” she told the media. “More people are coming online as the infrastructure for growth expands quickly. We are making certain changes in Google Earth so that the safety and other concerns of various governments could be addressed.”

The two sentences in that quote are so disjointed that they suggest a misquote, and Google hasn’t substantiated its content further. Still, the quote remains, and perhaps she merely spoke too soon.

Google now has a presence in India, both as an employer and as a seller. Should it give in to the Indian government’s censorship demands, then the floodgates will open, and any country with a luddite government where Google wants to do business will now demand the blurring of arbitrary locations as the price of admission.

• ThinkLemon has made an updated KMZ file of suspected Earth impact structures, made from the the Impact Field Studies Group’s database, brought up to date just his month. (Is it me, or does Sweden seem particularly prone to being rained on from outer space?)
• Google Earth Hacks has a great KMZ file pinpointing hundreds of US missile silos and weapons depots. Where placemarks are located on top of high resolution imagery, you notice that most of these locations seem to be abandoned remnants from the cold war. Still, very interesting to see how they are dispersed geographically. (Now we just need the ones for China, Russia, India, Pakistan, France, UK and Israel. Anyone?)
• KML Home Companion, Jim Cser’s free ArcMap extension that lets GIS pros output KML files, is now up to version 3.1, This latest update gives you a precision boost and better categories. It’s available here.
• Some versions of Valery’s KMLer application, an ArcGIS 9 extension that lets you both export and import KML, just got more affordable. Writes Valery: “Old Price: Standard / Plus / Pro – USD 20 / 50 / 100

  New Price: Standard / Plus / Pro – USD 20 / 35 / 50 Buy it.” (Prices aren’t updated yet on KMLer’s home page.)

We all went “nobody saw that??” When the Kebira impact crater in Libya was discovered and we flew on over in Google Earth to have a look. Astroseti.org’s Emilio González decided to go hunt for some more, and appears to have found some promising candidates in no time at all. He’s checked with the experts, and they say the finds look promising (though confirmation requires geologists on site). Says Emilio:

But the most important thing of this story is, probably, that using a free distributed software (Google Earth, but I’m also using NASA World Wind) anyone can search for similar structures.

I’ve made a KMZ file with Emilio’s candidate craters [KMZ]. Go have a look. He notes that they are aligned with the Aorounga crater further south in Chad, which makes it possible they are part of the same event. (The KMZ file also has Kebira, Aorounga, ThinkLemon’s database of Africa impact structures, a recent find from 2004 on the Gilf Kebir plateau in Egypt, and a few of my own candidates for good measure:-)

So what’s going on here? My guess is that until Google Earth came out, there was far more desert and tundra than there were scientists looking at satellite pictures of desert and tundra. Until a year ago, much of this imagery had to be bought, and that would have been too costly for individuals or even bored scientists — after all, why buy imagery of a specific area on the off chance you find a crater?

All that has changed with Google Earth. Back in September, Luca Mori discovered a Roman villa using Google Maps. More recently, the Kebira crater discovery prompted news that there might be one in Northern Canada, as blogged by Google Earth Blog.

Just like maths and physics has turned to distributed computing to break new ground, so too can geography, geology, and archaeology turn to distributed Google Earthing. There’s enough tundra and desert for everyone. Let’s get going.

As Declan promised, there are two long articles in France’s Le Monde today (in French) about satellite mapping — one of them focusing on Google Earth proper. (The other looks more broadly at the satellite imaging industry.)

The article about Google Earth begins badly by describing the application as a website, and appears to conflate Google Local with Google Earth, as it lists both NASA World Wind and Windows Live Local as the competition. But then it redeems itself by reporting an interesting observation by Thierry Rousselin, a GIS consultant. Rousselin maintains that geobrowsers like Google Earth constitute a second revolution in the democratization of maps, but one no less momentous than the first one, at the beginning of the 20th century.

What happened then? Translating:

Companies that had nothing to do with mapping, that sold petrol or automobile parts, like Michelin, launched themselves into the production of maps in order to give the first motorists a taste for the road. This liberated cartography, which had until then been principally confined to servicing war ministries.

With Google as the outsider this time around, it’s a clear case of déja vu. The internet now, just like cars then, was a relatively new phenomenon whose disruptive nature competely rewrote the demand picture for maps. And it is Google now, like Michelin then, that moved to fill the need. I’ve learned something new today:-)

The Bay Area’s Chico Enterprise Record has a wonderful writeup of a USGS-produced “virtual helicopter ride” along the length of the Hayward Fault, near San Francisco.

This is a fascinating Google Earth file, and not just because it’s annotated with closeup pictures. The Hayward Fault is also due for an Earthquake, so it’s perhaps best to get to know it now:

“The Hayward Fault is locked and loaded,” said USGS seismologist Tom Brocher. “It is ready to fire at any time.”

Impatient types can get at the KMZ file directly from this USGS site. The data is also available natively for ArcGIS.

[Update 2006-03-11: The Unofficial Google Weblog has now retracted its post, after some further prodding by Felix Salmon. But Kudos for running the correction, though.]

The Unofficial Google Weblog gets its Google Earth news story — Sensitive India Areas Removed from Google Earth — exactly wrong. How might that happen? It takes a collaborative effort.

First, find a local reporter with a misplaced sense of national pride. Let him write a piece of wishful thinking in a notoriously biased newspaper that begins thus:

NEW DELHI: Don’t expect to see clear Google Earth satellite images of Rashtrapati Bhavan, PMO, armed forces headquarters and sensitive nuclear installations on the website any more.

Then get a weblog editor to read this at face value. Furthermore, require him not to take 30 seconds to check up on Rashtrapati Bhavan to see if it might actually be true. Finally, embellish the story with a completely untrue meme that survives from the last time we went through this:

Google has also fielded similar concerns from the US Government, and has switched up areas with lower resolutions, and blurred areas.

Precisely the opposite is true. Each successive data update has seen higher resolution imagery, never lower. There has never been a case, in the US or elsewhere, where existing imagery has been switched for blurred images. Nor has the US ever asked for areas to be blurred, something which Google has confirmed. For a blog to say it has doesn’t make it so.

Nevertheless, expect this meme to do the rounds now that a mainstream blog has validated it. Who watches the watchers, indeed? This kind of sloppiness gives blogging a bad name.