News | May 24, 2004

Keyhole® Introduces Keyhole® 2 Pro With Powerful New Location Intelligence Capabilities

Personal Data Visualization and Workgroup Collaboration Features Accelerate Geospatial Decisions

Las Vegas, NV - Keyhole Corporation, the 3D Internet digital earth pioneer, today announced the preview release of Keyhole® 2 Pro, a major new enhancement of Keyhole's flagship professional client software. Keyhole 2 Pro represents a quantum leap forward in capabilities and usefulness, defining the leading edge of geospatial decision support solutions. Keyhole 2 Pro offers advanced location data visualization of industry standard file formats, enhanced collaboration and expanded enterprise integration, among other improvements.

"Keyhole 2 Pro is the definitive platform for location intelligence," said John Hanke, Keyhole CEO. "Unlike any other solution, Keyhole 2 Pro gives business and government users the unique ability to integrate their own data, share their work, and visualize the results utilizing Keyhole's powerful Internet-hosted massive earth database consisting of earth imagery, 3D terrain and geospatial data. All users can now easily integrate their data in standard mapping file formats into the Keyhole environment, manipulate it, a! nd share their output among co-workers. Keyhole 2 Pro brings the potential for dramatic productivity gains to users in all location-dependent fields."

Keyhole 2 Pro enhancements include:

  • Advanced desktop data visualization of GIS, CAD, and imagery file formats:

    Users can now visualize their own data on top of Keyhole's Internet-hosted base map by simply dragging and dropping files. The traditional complex process of collecting geographic data, converting into compatible formats, and integrating it with complex tools, can now be accomplished with a few mouse clicks in Keyhole 2 Pro.

    • Keyhole 2 Pro offers Data Import, an add-on module with support for more than 15 GIS industry standard file formats ranging from .shp and .tab to .dgn.
    • New Overlay capabilities support additional file formats ranging from JPG, and BMP to GeoTIFF.

  • Collaboration

    Enhanced collaboration in Keyhole 2 Pro gives location-dependent organizations the ability to collaborate without sending physical photographs, maps, or other cumbersome collections of data on paper or CD.

    • Users can easily share collections of Keyhole Placemarks™, image overlays, and geospatial searches with perspective views, annotations, URL/intranet links, and overlays.
    • Utilizing Keyhole 2 Pro's "KML" data interchange, Placemarks and their associated meta-data can be saved to a network drive for automatic updating at programmable intervals.

  • Enterprise Integration

    The geospatial data collected by businesses and government agencies has historically been difficult to distribute effectively to decision makers and operational personnel. Keyhole 2 Pro makes it easier than ever to give end users full interactive access to rich geospatial data, leveraging historical investments in GIS to generate significant productivity gains.

    • Keyhole 2 Pro streamlines integration using Keyhole Markup Language (KML), an XML-based schema for managing 3D geospatial data.

    Keyhole 2 Pro delivers benefits for customers in a wide range of industries including:

  • Real Estate
    • Real estate professionals are now able to research, analyze, present, and collaborate with a single powerful tool. By sharing Placemarks and KML files for display on the Keyhole base map, real estate professionals can dramatically accelerate the review and approval process for all transactions.

  • Government
    • Government users can now access all their data with greater ease, visualizing it directly in Keyhole 2 Pro overlaid on actual earth imagery. Property information such as plot lines, ownership, zoning, and tax assessment can be easily displayed as an overlay on the property, enabling instant understanding of a site's disposition. In addition, Keyhole Pro's enhanced collaboration capability facilitates faster decision making and greater productivity within government agencies.

  • AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction)
    • AEC firms can now easily import designs, diagrams, and schematics directly into Keyhole 2 Pro for visualization in a 3D earth view. With support for MicroStation .dgn and major GIS file formats, Keyhole 2 Pro makes the visualization process nearly instantaneous. In addition, Keyhole 2 Pro's collaboration features promise to give AEC professionals a faster way to get feedback on site characteristics and their impact on desig! ns and project plans without sending large cumbersome printouts and files.

    Keyhole 2 Pro will be previewed to the public for the first time on May 24, 2004 at the ICSC Spring Conference 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and will be released for public beta in June 2004. Full public release is expected in July 2004.

    About Keyhole Corporation
    Based in Mountain View, CA, Keyhole, Inc., is the Internet 3D earth visualization pioneer and creator of the groundbreaking rich-mapping Keyhole solution that transforms the way users interact with geographic information and earth imagery. Keyhole's patent-pending EarthStream™ technology accelerates and enhances decisions for business and government by enabling fast, fluid interaction with multi-terabyte network-resident databases of earth imagery and geospatial information. Users can "fly" from space to street level seamlessly while interactively exploring layers of information including roads, schoo ls, businesses, and demographics. Keyhole provides solutions to customers in dozens of industries including the real estate, AEC (architecture, engineering and construction), transportation, insurance and government sectors. Further information about Keyhole is available at http://www.keyhole.com.

    Source: Keyhole Corporation