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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

I currently work for Yell Labs in the UK (though quit last week to fully commit to the startup I'm working on with 2 other great guys), and we use C3 on the maps part of the main website.

If you want to see what it looks like, try this: http://www.yell.com/map/

Only a few locations in the UK were commissioned... the cost is high so we aimed at the large cities to start with. It's really good stuff so long as you stay away from trees that are near buildings ;)

The dataset is enormous though. Going to be interesting to see that go mobile.

C3 basically took a FPS game map approach (poly data and textures) and overlaid that with a tiled map approach. So each tile downloads the poly and then lays the texture for that tile over the poly.

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This is truly mindblowing. But apart from the obviously neat 3D effect, this is the first time I see aerial photos that look beautiful. Those you find on Bing and Google often suffer from ugly colors.

I thought those were satellite, not aerial pics?

Try the "Bird's Eye" option when using Bing Maps.

They use both, for different resolutions.

The trees definitely do distort certain features though - one good example is the tree lined sidewalk next to Buckingham Palace - when viewing in a top down view and then tilting the camera, you can see how the technology assumes the content under the trees (the sidewalk) would be the same outline as the top down view of the trees that are hanging over the sidewalk. This causes an interesting warp on the rendered view. It's interesting how realistic everything looks until it reaches that issue. Still a very nice example of the technology in use.

My question to you, sir, is how did you manage to get such a domain name for a seemingly bootstrapped company? Kudos!

It's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yell_Group

Amusing indictment of the UK's longest-established [1] directory service that they look "seemingly bootstrapped" at a glance.

[1] Yellow Pages started 1954 in the UK

It's even older, it belonged to the GPO (General Post Office) before that, which is why it is yellow... the post office was yellow before it obtained the royal charter, renamed and rebranded.

I think you got confused...

I currently work for Yell (multi-national, been around for ever).

But, I have been working on a startup in my spare time for which I've now (as of last week) quit my day job to fully commit to.

The startup has no money and will be the definition of frugal until we turn profit, Yell has less (they may make tons from sales and be profitable quarter to quarter, but they're saddled with amazing levels of debt).

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