alarm:clock

Web 2.0 - Thursday, May 31, 2007

Google Buys Spanish Mapmaker Panoramio

There is lot of news company out of a big online mapping confab this week. Panoramio, a website that connects millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken, has been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount.

Panoramio users can search and browse Panoramio photos and edit the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites. For example Everytrail.com made use of the API for their GPS Travel Community. Panoramio has had a default layer within Google Earth since January 2007. The founders acknowledge in their blog announcement that they knew they were headed down the path toward Google buy-out when they did the Google Earth layer.

The site has 330K registered users and 1.1M geolocated photos.

Flickr has a similar service here.

The company was founded by Joaquín Cuenca Abela. Previosly, Abela founded Loquo, a Spanish clone of Craigslist, from the end of 2004 until Loquo was sold to eBay in 2005. He co-founded Panoramio in the summer of 2005 with a co-worker from Loquoa, Eduardo Manchón.

In addition to Panoramio, Abela and Manchón have 2 other projects, Cursoo an e-learning platform and Revoluz a real estate mash-up with Google Maps.

View - announcement