Aussie mapping technology set to take on Google

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 15:25

Your IT - Home IT

According to Griffith, "Because we use standard Cesna 210 aircraft, we can go to any airport, hire the plane and the pilot for a couple of days [to carry out a complete survey of a major city] and we are done."

He added: "We have automated the processing so that within the week we can be publishing the result. We are also delivering a digital elevation model as another automated output from the system...We would not contemplate flying the whole of Australia monthly - annually would probably be sufficient."

The NearMap portal (http://nearmap.com ) is due to go live before year end with monthly coverage of Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane that has been built up over the past year (It was live but not working correctly earlier this week, but that seems to have been an oversight - within hours of iTWire speaking to Griffith) the site had been password protected).

Griffith said: "We will formally launch the portal this quarter. There are multiple revenue streams but the main one is licensing the service to local, state and Federal Governments,  It will be free to consumers."

Griffith conjures up a vision of the information and service that NearMap will provide as a kind of "national digital terrain information infrastructure...like roads, railways, or even the NBN," that can bring very considerable economic benefits.

"What we are really talking about is a national digital infrastructure layer that has many downstream applications that industry could develop and we would get the benefits over several years," he said. "It would  be a step forward for this country if the Federal Government was to contemplate a national digital infrastructure layer like this."

According to Griffith, "An independent Allen Consulting Group study estimates the use of NearMap datasets will increase Australia’s GDP by $6.8 billon and create an additional 4,200 jobs by 2015." He told iTWire "They did that independently using the Monash Model. They looked at the various segments of the market: infrastructure, urban planning ,climate change, etc."

However Australia's five cities are only the first stage of Ipernica's ambitions for NearMap. Griffith said: "Our vision is  to do this globally: to fly 700 cities. How we do that, only time will tell. Australia is very much the test country. We are deploying this quarter and then the world wil be able to see what we are doing."