My memory is not what it used to be...Don't know if this was posted before ??
Mapping as a Service
This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series xyHt in print, January 2016
Fueled by the convergence of cloud computing, digital automation, and internet distribution, subscription mapping creates new opportunities.
nearmap
One of the companies tackling these opportunities is Australia-based nearmap, a visual analytics company that offers a cloud-based subscription service, targeting businesses via frequent, high-resolution, and historical aerial imagery. They produce georeferenced images of populated urban areas updated three to six times per year at better than 2.8 inch (7.1 cm) GSD. Users have access to all its data archives over the same area, allowing for temporal change detection.
For all its offerings, nearmap’s subscription service is currently based on a pay-as-you-consume pricing. nearmap has been successful with this business model in Australia, reaching 89% of its population. It’s expanding into the U.S. market, even relocating its management team to San Francisco, now reaching 50% of the U.S. population.
To service their wide range of customers, nearmap has a fleet of aircraft and camera systems to capture urban areas based on a schedule to revisit multiple times per year. Their in-house camera and pod systems go hand-in-hand with their proprietary mapping workflows. This integration of software, hardware, and data processing enables them to fly an area and publish the map three to five days after a flight. In Australia, nearmap provides orthophotos and oblique imagery. In the U.S., they are currently providing orthoimagery, but have plans to offer more.
As industry veterans will recall, many companies, both aerial and satellite, have tried similar subscription mapping services. They flew certain areas non-commissioned, then tried to sell the data to multiple clients. However, there is a graveyard of such companies. The high costs of operations and map production, the inability of one-size-fits-all accuracies (too many different types of customers), and a dependency on government as clients made mapping as a service very difficult to sustain. Crucially, internet connections, speeds, and access were issues that even a decade ago hampered dissemination and market size.
What’s different this time are a few aspects of the internet age that may tip in favor of companies like nearmap...
