As result of a cooperation between Google and Geoimage-Austria, more parts of Austria (even rural areas!) are now as amazing 25cm high resultion imagery available in Google Maps (in Google Earth soon):
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In Geoimage-Austria work five (out of nine) Austrian federal states together with LFRZ on creating imagery for this country. LFRZ is a former public agency, since 10 years an outsourced private company and providing the public sector with geo-technology. Their schedule is to cover the entire country with such high resolution imagery until 2009. [via GEObranchen]
Good news for all German Virtual Earth mash-ups: Microsoft finished an imagery update for entire Germany, based on data delivered by Intergraph (and GeoContent). According to Intergraph’s press release the new maps provide an accuracy of up to 1m in rural and 50cm in urban areas. Additionally, Microsoft’s fantastic Bird’s eye view is now available for 80 German cities.
GoYellow, based on Endoxon (which was partly acquired by Google), seems to be using the same imagery, but somehow the softer coloring and cartography do look better in Virtual Earth.
Theresienwiese in Munich in Virtual Earth:
and in GoYellow:
Same imagery, different visualization. [via Geobranchen.de]
I hope Austria will follow soon. Next year the Euro 2008 is happening here and the main stadium in Vienna still looks a bit fuzzy. Some parts of Austria are well covered by Herold maps (the Austrian yellow pages company), but they don’t provide an API, so no luck for external applications.