Google Buys Endoxon

Google has acquired Swiss mapping company Endoxon — or at least its Internet, mapping and data processing units; the cartography, analysis and geodata units have been spun off as Mappuls AG. The acquisition is apparently meant to bolster the technology behind Google Maps and Earth, and to help the European side of their business, but as to what that means in concrete terms, I have no idea — I hadn’t heard of Endoxon prior to this. Anyone know what Google’s up to here? (Thanks, Paul.)

Posted on Monday, December 18, 2006 at 9:30 AM
Categories: Online Maps

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Comments

Endoxon:
- local.ch
- goyellow.de
- map.search.ch

These are some quite impressive examples what Endoxon implemented/provides data for.

eLd0raDo | 12/18/2006 at 10:52 AM | #

I posted an entry about map.search.ch in February 2005 and was awfully impressed with it at the time. So they’re the folks behind it. Interesting.

Jonathan Crowe | 12/18/2006 at 10:56 AM | #

To be more precise, Endoxon is not really responsible for these portals (GoYellow is a German company offering online yellow pages), they just provided the technology for the mapping services on these platforms.

An interesting company surely, but there are rumours that they failed to secure financing for further expansion, which may explain why they split up the company and sold off their IT units.

Mappuls has a press release which states that one of the technologies which Google acquired is a mapping solution which allows for the geo-referenced search via mobile applications.

Claus Moser | 12/18/2006 at 11:11 AM | #

endoxon is my main program for finding things. It has always had really good aerial imagery and the color balancing of the imagery made it more attractive. The resolution was always high.

http://www.goyellow.de/map.html?lat=52.51582089552239&lon=13.282399999999999&s=0.409&mt=1&z=10

You might be interested to know Paris Hilton posed with these folks when they got rolling, she was sitting in front of a map screen ….

endoxon managed to make the program fast. Real fast. And, it managed to include adverts into the app long ago - which I admit to using a few times. The speed and quality were high.

I think most companies providing sat maps will be faced with more real-time challenges, and aerial imagery provides one solution in addition to satellite imagery.

The other company to watch in this arena, in Europe, is BLOM A/S.

Vector One | 12/18/2006 at 11:33 AM | #

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