Tuesday, March 21. 2006

What else do Keyhole and SketchUp have in common?

Brian C. Norton notes in a comment at SlashGeo that not only both were acquired by Google, but also that they were funded by CIA via In-Q-Tel. He notes a few more Google might want: metacarta (natural language/document geocoding), spotfire (visual data mining), pixlogic (automated image exploitation, tagging, searching).

I'll add a few more from the In-Q-Tel portfolio: IDELIX (in context zooming, I'm suprised they've not yet been acquired) and Rosum (location determination by TV signals).

It sure was nice for the CIA to fund these companies for Google to buy, isn't it?

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Quite nice, indeed! I wonder if the CIA hopes to somehow recoup their investment. They should, if public money went into these companies. Hmmm...

#1 Atanas Entchev (Link) on 2006-03-21 16:07 (Reply)

The whole promise behind In-Q-Tel was that it would enable the intelligence community to leverage the vibrant startup sector. Put simply, there's so much innovation out there that playing a quasi-VC role allowed In-Q-Tel and its shareholders to piggyback very inexpensively. The exits alone have made it a financial success - the real metric, however, is whether the technologies have helped the agencies and I think that answer is a clear Yes.

#2 Jon (Link) on 2006-06-09 20:00 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Atanas Entchev on 2006-03-21 16:07 #2: Jon on 2006-06-09 20:00
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