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And it was stolen by Google, apparently.
by sigg3 5y ago
And it was stolen by Google, apparently.
- Lammy 5y agoNot exactly: https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/ https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/ One of my favorite coincidences is how the mapping startup has the same name as NRO’s series of orbital surveillance platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen This is also where the “K” in “KML” comes from (Keyhole Markup Language)
- c0nsumer 5y agoProbably not a coincidence. The Keyhole name was in the public realm prior to this. (It'd been used within the intelligence community since the late 50s.)
- Rebelgecko 5y agoI believe it was an intentional reference
- khazhoux 5y agoExcept a court decided they didn't. This company didn't have a claim on the idea of 3D visualization of the planet.
- rhacker 5y agoBy Jury. And at the time Google was a highly popular company. I still think a lot of large companies get away with stealing the candy from others.
- khazhoux 5y agoBut Keyhole did not steal anyone's candy. The origin for the product (and I'm paraphrasing the story here, secondhand) was actually SGI'ers had developed a method for efficiently rendering gigantic textures at multiple levels of detail. They looked for the largest texture they could find for their demos, and that turned out to be high-res terrestrial imagery. This demo app then turned into the Keyhole product itself. This technology was developed inside the world's leading computer graphics company, where people spent 24/7 thinking about how to render 3D graphics and textures better, faster, at higher resolutions. And Keyhole was merely a 3d app that happened to be showing the planet. The other company did not have a valid claim against that.