Redlands, California—ArcGIS users now have access to a new premium map service in ArcGIS Online. The USA Prime Imagery premium service includes i-cubed's Nationwide Prime 1-meter or better resolution imagery for the continental United States. Included with this imagery are i-cubed's 15-meter eSAT imagery at medium-to-large scales and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Blue Marble: Next Generation 500-meter resolution imagery at small scales.  The 2D maps and 3D globe services of i-cubed can be leveraged by ArcGIS users to author and publish maps and perform situational analysis.

"We believe that a high-resolution online imagery service like Nationwide Prime, which is updated quarterly with the latest commercial and publicly available data, will give ArcGIS users an invaluable base for a wide variety of GIS projects and applications," said Andrew Pitcairn, i-cubed's senior director, strategic sales.

ArcGIS Online services, a family of Web-based data products, is now available to ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Explorer, and ArcGIS Server users. ArcGIS Online gives you the ability to access online map content as well as make your own content available to other users from your own server. ArcGIS Mobile users will be able to connect to ArcGIS Online services in the near future. A new version of ArcGIS Explorer was released on August 20, 2008, to support the new premium services.

"By helping to provide ArcGIS users with consistently updated, high-quality commercial imagery of the United States, i-cubed has been an important partner in delivering premier imagery for projects requiring such basemaps," said Rob Shanks, senior product manager for the ArcGIS Online program at ESRI.

In addition to premium imagery, ArcGIS Online gives users access to street maps, topographic maps, and shaded relief maps. Being able to access all this data from one source greatly reduces the amount of time finding and managing data and eliminates the need for an organization to invest in additional hardware to maintain datasets.

Learn more about ArcGIS Online at www.esri.com/arcgisonlineservices.

About ESRI

Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.