Blue Dasher Technologies Street-Level Photography Captures Images With Unparalleled Clarity, Speed
Written by Blue Dasher Technologies
31 March 2008
Completes Every Street in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Las Vegas and South Florida in Record Time
CTIA 2008 Las Vegas, April 1, 2008 —Blue Dasher Technologies today announced the completion of comprehensive high-density photography of every public street in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, South Florida and Las Vegas, all captured in record time with industry-leading clarity and accuracy. Unlike other approaches, when viewed online the 360° images from Blue Dasher Technologies are seamless, creating an experience similar to driving down the street.
Designed by a 20-year GIS industry veteran, this new solution uses software built from the ground up to account for the problems inherent in relying on GPS signals to determine the location of each picture. Viewing these images online is much more like video, providing a stark contrast to today’s point-click-wait experience of viewing street-level photography.
Blue Dasher spherical images and the underlying data are delivered as a GIS platform that is licensed to support navigation, consumer purchase decision making, and management reporting for commercial, industrial and government applications. The company’s platform also provides advanced search and routing capabilities and has a fully customizable interface. In addition, licensees have the ability to imbed multimedia images or advertising into specific points within a geographic area.
Blue Dasher Technologies built their software to overcome the traditional limitations of GPS signals and to enable image capture vehicles to travel as fast as posted speed limits on streets and highways. This has made it possible to cover every street in a county quickly, and at the same time capture the large number of photographs needed for a superior user experience.
Past approaches limit the speed of travel, sometimes to 15 mph or less. Blue Dasher vehicles travel with the normal flow of traffic and capture one picture every 10 feet. The resulting high-density photography gives viewers unparalleled clarity. In addition, with Blue Dasher, users have access to exact addresses, not approximations, which results in a much more useful tool for planning a trip online or checking out a building and neighborhood.
During a recent three-week period, the company captured more than 7.5 million images covering every public street in Las Vegas and expects to complete the top 50 metropolitan areas by year-end.
“The approach we’re taking is a practical solution for street-level photography that’s very robust and scalable,” according to Michael Reidbord, CEO of Blue Dasher Technologies. “From an operations standpoint, this means being able to drive at a normal rate of speed and still capture high-resolution, geo-coded photos of every street. For users, this means a fluid experience and knowing the exact address of every location. From either perspective, this is unlike anything that people are familiar with today.”
Continued Reidbord, “The experience we’ve created online is powerful, and with the high-density photography, there’s just so much more for people to really use. With the functionality we have built in, we’ve made it easy for people to see every turn of their trip, to know the exact street address of every building, not approximations, and to zoom in and see details.”
Mr. Reidbord added, “In both Europe and the US, we’ve seen a great deal of interest in what can be done with this platform to improve site performance, such as lead generation or transaction revenue, and also increase ad revenue with a new, highly differentiated opportunity for advertisers to embed multimedia images.”
Founded in 2007, the company draws on more than 20 years of work in the GIS and real estate industries. Previous companies founded by Blue Dasher principals built GIS solutions for the oil and gas industry, and state and local governments, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the states of Louisiana and Florida.
Blue Dasher Technologies
Blue Dasher Technologies captures 360° street-level images and provides these through its platform to Websites, navigation suppliers, and GIS vendors. The platform provides image playback that is smooth and clear, with the exact addresses of buildings and lots, advanced search and routing, and support for embedded multimedia.
The company is based in Miami and is privately held. More information, including online demos, is at www.BlueDasherTech.com.
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