In a very quiet note on its website, GeoTango announced on December 23 that the Canadian visualization company was acquired by Microsoft. GeoTango is known for its 3D visualiziation and content development tools.
I suspect that Microsoft was most interested in the company’s 3D Internet visualization offering, GeoTango GlobeView, which according to the company “delivers a 3D digital earth allowing you to interactively explore the world.” Its distinguishing feature? “Unlike other systems GeoTango GlobeView offers a truly open and web services-oriented solution.” Truly open may refer to its support for XML, Web standards as well as OpenGIS standards.
The product with which I am most familiar, and which may be used to build data for Microsoft products and perhaps to be sold as well, is SilverEye, an image processing package that generates 3D building models from single images. The company calls it “the fastest approach to build 3D models of any location in the world.”
The entire GeoTango website, save the main page, seems to have been removed from the Web. That may be an oversight, or may be for competitive reasons. A cached version from Google is still around, at least for a while.
GeoTango made a big splash at ASPRS in 2004 (I covered it) and more recently showed its wares at Where 2.0, where Nat described GlobeView as the “other side of the coin” from Google Earth since it’s in the browser.
Clearly, Microsoft is looking to catch up with or surpass Google in this space. Also of interest, the open standards part of the equation puts Microsoft into closer competition with ESRI’s upcoming ArcGIS Explorer.
