Teach me about StreetView and similar services.

October 26, 2010 7:21 AM

What are the competitors to Google Street View?

StreetView seems to be the dominant player in ground level photography integrated into online mapping services. Who else is doing it and how is it similar or different to Google's approach? Bonus points for links to technical explanations of the equipment and process used for the photography.

posted by modernnomad to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Amazon A9 used to have a block view feature that worked like Google Street View, more or less. It actually preceded Street View by a couple of years, but Amazon took it down in 2006.
posted by enn at 7:30 AM on October 26, 2010

I don't know anything about the technical details, but eXtreme Soft Group from Romania have NORC, covering multiple cities in Romania, Hungary, Austria, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Russia.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 7:33 AM on October 26, 2010

Wikipedia has an incomplete list, plus a few others in the "See Also" section.

Bing has "Streetside" in some areas in the Silverlight version of their maps site.
posted by theodolite at 7:35 AM on October 26, 2010

There are loads of links to similar services on this blog entry from GoogleSystem.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 7:36 AM on October 26, 2010

Here in Sweden, both hitta and eniro have street view. Google's is still better in certain cases (for example, finding streets based on partial or badly-written names).
posted by beerbajay at 7:38 AM on October 26, 2010

Oh, i see that's in the wikipedia article =(
posted by beerbajay at 7:39 AM on October 26, 2010

Bing maps has something similar, too.
posted by empath at 8:08 AM on October 26, 2010

This doesn't entirely answer your question, but it's still relevant. Have you ever wondered about why Street View exists, and what the point of having all these images is? Check out this announcement from about a year ago – Google no longer needs to pay license fees to Tele Atlas or anyone else for map data in the United States, since everything's been replaced with its own data. These data were created by thousands and thousands of people actually looking at Street View images and entering street names, number of lanes, one-way signs, and what not.

This is also significant, because the licenses for using map data for turn-by-turn navigation are right abuot $100 per user. Remember the $99.99 iPhone GPS navigation apps (nowadays, they cost more like $59.99)? Well, Google turn-by-turn GPS navigation is entirely free (and quite a few people will argue, better) on Android phones.
posted by halogen at 9:29 AM on October 26, 2010 [4 favorites]