India launches Bhuvan, rival to Google Earth - Times Online: "India has launched a rival to Google Earth, the search engine's hugely popular satellite imagery service.
The online tool, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), has been developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). Its debut comes as India redoubles its efforts to reap profits from its 45-year-old state-sponsored space programme, criticised by some as a drain on a country where 700 million people live on $US2 a day or less.
The new site also follows in the slipstream of the country's first moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, which successfully reached the lunar surface last November.
Bhuvan uses a network of Indian satellites to create a high-resolution, birds-eye view of India that is accessible at no cost online and will compete with Google Earth.
The service has been specially designed to run smoothly on the low bandwidth internet connections that most Indian web users have to make do with. Even so, attempts by The Times to access yesterday morning failed - possibly because of a flood of users eager to test the site."
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