Jimmy Magahern on why things are looking up for the giants selling photos of your backyard and driveway. Maybe you should be looking up too.


For the right price, Ian Erickson could probably fetch a photo of where you were on the last day you called in sick to work and e-mail it to your boss.

He’d have to ask your employer a few quick questions first. Like, “Does the subject carry a company cell phone?” If so, chances are that slim little gizmo doubles as a stealth tracking device, constantly broadcasting its precise geographic position to anyone with the technology and the authorization to retrieve it.

Erickson would also want to know what day you decided to play hooky. Depending on the location of the satellites orbiting the Earth, an extremely detailed shot of virtually every square foot on the planet – in resolutions high enough to show the shadow of a fire hydrant – can now be obtained from space every 72 hours.

With any luck, the one circling over the ballgame you were taking in that day or the competing company you were interviewing with, didn’t snap you at the precise time you were there. Nevertheless, the boss’ll have a pretty recent shot of the building to look for on the drive home – not to mention its owner’s name and exact address, pulled from other available data all tied to geographic location.

Lastly, Erickson would have to ask your boss the one question that usually aborts such quixotic James Bond missions, namely “Can you afford it?”

“That’s usually where they get stopped,” says the seasoned GIS (Geographic Information System) geek, who runs his own consulting firm in Gold Canyon called AnalyGIS and has partnered with a few West Coast “location intelligence” companies to develop innovative mapping applications.

“The first question we usually get is, ‘Can you do this, or add this [data] to a map?’ And the answer is generally ‘Yes,’” he says. “Whether or not they can afford the data is always a different question.”

That may be changing, thanks to the availability of free Web-based applications like Google Earth and its closest competitors, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and the revamped Yahoo! Maps.

Until recently, Erickson says, the cost of setting up a system to fetch such images and data could run a company anywhere from $60,000 to $120,000.

Now, by just going to Google’s map page and typing in an address, anyone can snatch a satellite view of virtually any place in the world – instantly, and at no cost. Download the free, multi-platform Google Earth application, and you can zoom in closer, tilt the view around and access layers of data over the image that can show you anything from the location of the nearest pizza place to the number of kids living in your neighbor’s house.

“What Google Earth has done,” Erickson says, “is put that technology up for free, to the world.”

Understandably, many of the companies selling software similar to what Google is now giving away are irked over the gentle giant’s entry into the field.

But a greater majority of players in the GIS business – including a surprising number of Phoenix firms specializing in the capture, digitization and aggregation of aerial imagery – are jazzed over the public interest the new killer app has generated in their traditionally nerdish pursuit.

“It’s taken what we do out of the dark and dusty shadows,” Erickson says. “Not that what we in the GIS field do is dark,” he quickly clarifies. “What we do shouldn’t be considered spying. It’s never implemented in that way.”

That too may be changing, now that the tools to peer in on the world’s backyards are in the hands of everybody on the Internet.

In Phoenix alone, Erickson says he’s heard of everything from underground skater-punk ’zines wanting to publish current photos of all the drained swimming pools in town, to bold retailers extending the personalization potential of direct-mail pieces by actually printing overhead views of each house to which their inserts are mailed.

“People have immediately begun recognizing opportunities where they can take that technology and use it for other purposes – many times even for purposes that we could never have conceived of,” Erickson says.

“That’s exciting. But it can also be a little scary.”

The Spying Community

The sudden easy availability of all this aerial photography and data has made Google Earth kind of the Napster of the “smart map” biz, allowing free access to a level of satellite imagery previously privy to government contracts and military usage, and cutting-edge application development that, up until now, only the largest corporations could afford.

The app has even amassed its own cult of enthusiasts, the Google Earth Community, made up of people who place virtual thumbtacks over areas of interest on their own screens (ID-ing everything from the Great Pyramids and Tom Cruise and Katy Holmes’ mansion to a nude beach in Chalupy, Poland and the world’s biggest ball of twine) and then instantly upload their “placemarks” to Google’s server, where the labeled tacks are shared with the world on the community “layer,” switched on with a single mouse click.

“It’s cool,” agrees Rob Decker of AirPhoto USA in north Phoenix, one of the nation’s largest digitizers of high-resolution aerial imagery and a company that, in fact, sells its own pro-level interface that provides many of the same functions as Google Earth.

“It’s cool stuff to play with, and it’s cool to look at. But it’s not the best thing out there.”

Google Earth’s major limitation is the currency and resolution of the aerial imagery it uses. Most of the time, a first-time user zeroing in on his house finds a picture of his yard with two-year-old landscaping, and discovers he’s unable to zoom in close enough to even make out what car he had parked in the driveway that year.

“Generally, imagery that you can find for free is usually much older than the images you’d find in a professional application,” explains Decker, noting that aerial images are priced according to currency and resolution.

That’s where companies like AirPhoto and Tempe’s Aerials Express come in, providing – for a fee – clearer and more current imagery that can often be displayed, as a layer, in Google’s free software, which openly permits such third-party noodling.

“Google Earth is a wonderful tool; they’ve really done an outstanding job with this,” says Aerials Express chief of operations Bill Landis, using the software to zoom in on a patch of Phoenix that eventually becomes patchy and blurry. “But this imagery here is probably two years old. That’s not going to be of much use to a land developer or real estate agent looking for a current view of this neighborhood.

“But now I can load our Phoenix photography in,” he says, clicking on a checkbox that instantly overlays the newer, more detailed Aerials Express imagery right over the Google map, in perfect registration, “and you can suddenly see the new freeways and developments. You’re still using Google’s cool interface. But now you’re working with images that are less than six months old, and much better quality.”

Jerry Landis, Bill’s dad and the founder of both Aerials Express and Landis Corp., the Valley’s oldest aerial photography firm, says last year was a banner one for the seven-year-old company, which raked in over $6 million in business. This year, Landis and son expect to fully double that volume.

The company is already outgrowing its headquarters in the Transamerica building at the ASU Research Park and is in the process of taking over larger digs on the same floor. The company is also thinking of expanding its staff of 45 employees “on the sales side,” says Bill, noting that the demand for aerial imagery is exploding.

“Aerial photography was so inaccessible to most people just a few years ago,” he marvels. “But with the Googles and Microsofts coming on board, everybody can now look at an aerial photograph. And the uses, I know, are just gonna skyrocket.”

Business Eyes

When Bill Landis first came to work at his dad’s aerial photography business at age 12, manually applying Zip-a-Tone tape around the municipal boundaries on the giant printed maps Landis Corp. produced, it was impossible to predict that one day this stuff would be so hot.

“When you’re 12, you’re outlining Ahwatukee with tape and thinking it looks like Snoopy,” laughs 41-year-old Bill Landis, pointing out the beagle-like borders of the Valley suburb on the wall-sized photo of Phoenix adorning the conference room of Aerials Express. “You’re not thinking that someday this is going to be a multi-million-dollar business.”

Now, Aerials Express is providing imagery to Yahoo! Maps. “When you zoom down to the closest level, that’ll be our photography,” says Jerry.

Interestingly, the elder Landis, who got into aerial photography in Phoenix back in 1958, says little has changed in the basic ways his business operates.

“We’re still doing literally the same thing we always have,” says the still robust 72-year-old pioneer. “We fly back and forth, we shoot photographs and put them back together to make a map. Only difference is, now we’re doing it all digitally instead of doing it by hand, on paper. And of course, we’re doing it all a lot faster.”

Not as fast as what most people imagine, though. Despite all the advances, putting together seamless pictures of the Earth is still a long, exacting procedure.

Landis leads a tour through a processing room, where the large film canisters sent in from the eleven different companies AE keeps constantly flying over the U.S. updating photos are scanned overnight into a digital format that his staff of roughly a dozen college kids then stitch together on PCs and “ortho-rectify,” stretching the images where there are mountains and flattening them out where there are valleys, to make sure the shots all lay perfectly over a map.

Landis is old-school – he works only with planes, not satellites – and bristles at the public misconception that most of the bird’s-eye views we see today are delivered by satellite, citing a recent Rand study that determined roughly 90 percent of the aerial imagery used today is still shot by airplanes.

Even though a satellite is capable of updating a photo of a particular area once every three days, Landis insists it’s still faster to contract a pilot to fly that same land, and that planes have the advantage of being able to photograph a city when the weather’s clearest – which may not fall into a satellite’s 72-hour orbit.

“If you use Google Earth to look at [the city], you’ll see they’ve got shots full of clouds,” Jerry laughs, noting that the abundance of clear days in the Valley is the principal reason so many aerial photographers settle here.

“The satellites happened to get the shots on one of the few days of the year it was cloudy here. That doesn’t happen when you’re working with planes.”

Even the fastest pilot and the most efficient computer geeks, however, can’t process a snapshot of a city as fast as the general public believes these images are refreshed.

“A lot of people think these are current images,” says Bill Landis. “Like, if it’s raining outside, they’ll expect to see that on Google. It’s not live. You’re not going to be able to watch your teenager bypass the library and drive to the mall.”

Landis laughs. “At least, not yet!”

Spies Like Them

While we may fear everyone from our nosey homeowners association to the local child predator is tapping into aerial photography to spy into our backyards, the boring truth is that so far, the biggest users of the new technology are chubby real estate agents and land developers, who’d rather scout new land parcels on their PC then get off their duffs and drive around town.

Jim Saxon is a northeast Valley real estate agent who was recently named the Phoenix regional manager of Digital Map Products, a California-based company that offers access to its map-enabled software as a subscription service over the Internet.

Even though DMP’s service puts sophisticated GIS technology into the hands of companies at one-fifth of what it would cost them to set up their own systems, Saxon says his biggest users are still realtors, home builders, title companies and government agencies more interested in spotting empty land parcels and choice cul-de-sac properties than in measuring the height of the weeds in your backyard.

“It’s a great tool for realtors,” he says. “Normally, if you’re looking to buy a house and say, ‘What’s available in this area?’ a realtor will pull up a bunch of records and you’ll have to drive around and look at all of ‘em.

“But I can go over here,” he says, scooting his chair across the wood flooring in his den and pulling up to his PC, “and show you where they are. ‘Oh, this one, you don’t want to look at ‘cause it backs up to a highway.’ ‘This is a good one ‘cause it backs up to the desert.’ The point is, if you’re looking to buy a house, don’t you want to hang with me? ‘Cause we’ll look at all this data visually.”

Saxon says that although the technology exists to zoom in close enough to render six inches of land for every pixel on a computer screen, shots of that resolution are still prohibitively expensive (up to $600 per pixel, according to Jerry Landis), and only city governments with substantial research budgets tend to spring for that level.

“Some cities go for that, because they need to get close enough to do things like right-of-way easements on properties so they can determine exactly where to put a roadway,” Saxon says, stifling a yawn. “But 80 percent of what people get only goes in to about 150 feet [above ground level] before it gets pixilated.”

Bill Landis agrees that most aerial photography today reveals much less than people fear.

“Even at best, right now you’re not going to be able to make people out from an aerial photograph,” he says, laughing at the suggestion that people adjust their backyard sunbathing schedules according to satellite positioning.

“If we take a picture over a beach, on a weekend, all you’re going to see are dots where the people are. It’s not like you have to hide now every time you see a plane overhead.”

That may change, says Ian Erickson, as the technology continues to become more sophisticated and affordable.

“Microsoft is coming out with something called Earth Eye,” says Erickson, “which will offer aerial images at 45-degree angles, as opposed to a top-down shot. You’ll literally be able to see, and sometimes identify, people on the street.

“That’s pretty cool,” he adds. “But it’s also kind of eerie, to know that that kind of technology is out there.” n