images

Either Google Germany's lawyers aren't up to snuff, or they're just stuck in a really hostile environment.  Regardless, a new report indicates that two court rulings would have Google stop showing certain thumbnail images in its search results.

You may recall about a month and a half ago, it was announced that GeoEye would be launching a satellite with the highest resolution available on the market and would be lending its technology to Google Maps. Today, the first image was released from the GeoEye-1. "We are pleased to release the first GeoEye-1 image, bringing us even closer to the start of the satellite's commercial operations and sales to our customers," says GeoEye CEO Matthew O'Connell.

Just a couple of weeks after Getty Images, the world's largest stock images company, appeared to have failed to find a buyer for itself, the company announced an agreement to be sold to private equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC for $2.4 billion. That's 55% more than the stock was valued on Wall Street.

Google Earth has added some new imagery in Spain according to the Google Earth Blog.Frank Taylor writes," There's a noticeable new area of imagery on the eastern edge of Spain covering Barcelona, which is copyrighted "Institut Cartogrfic de Catalunya". This imagery is not particularly high resolution - I would estimate about 1 meter/pixel. Not as good as Digital Globe, which is 60 cm/pixel."

Wikipedia is refusing to remove images of the prophet of Islam's Muhammad despite hundreds of thousands of requests.In some Muslim traditions, it is considered offensive to depict the prophet for fear the image would become an object of idol worship. Wikipedia argues that it is not offensive in all traditions, and that they will not bow to pressure to remove the images.

Images on Google Earth are highly detailed but do not show imagery in real-time. Many people according to Frank Taylor at his Google Earth Blog believe the images are in real time. He believes that is because of weather satellite photos that are a few hours old or because of live weather radar. He goes into detail how Google collects its images for Google Earth.

It seems like every week there’s another example of how the Internet has toppled business models that have been in place longer than the Internet itself. Control is not really possible when there are so many ways to pirate or undercut sales. The newspaper, music, movie, and now images market are changing drastically (and I love to read Seth Godin’s take on the changes).

Information Week has reported that in June of 07 Google filed a patent application, which has just become available, outlining a “method of optical character recognition in digital images.” The application seems to cover both static images as well as video. The ability to do this could radically change a number of existing Google services as well as again change the way the Internet marketing world interacts with images and video.