Monday, February 22, 2010

Welcome to Marine GeoGarage News


Our website is dedicated to any sailor or mariner who plans to study his next trip at sea, comfortably installed at home.

Marine GeoGarage has figured out a way to overlay a complete set of nautical raster charts over Google Maps.
So nautical charts can be viewed online with advanced quilting process (mosaic image with removed borders -map collars- for a seamless rendering display of multiple charts), zooming in and out, panning in a continuous way for selecting the specified map scale automatically (so the appropriate map), by simply sliding the mouse roll, with full transparency management via layer opacity sliders (for terrestrial maps and orthophoto overlay) and Google local search (marinas, harbour services...)

Marine GeoGarage proposes a feature (without any Login process) where the user can drop waypoints and create custom routes but which can also be saved if the user asks for a free account.

What is really cool about the site is that you can export out those saved routes and move them over directly to your Garmin GPS unit via the Garmin Communicator Plugin.

Marine GeoGarage is world's first nautical charts web portal with data coming from International Hydrographic Services built as a Software as a Service (SaaS) available in free and pay-per-use model.

Marine GeoGarage uses a Freemium business model -mix of ad supported and subscription-, offering these Web services (described above) for free while charging a Chart Premium for accessing to certain nautical charts layers and certain privileges (Ad-Free).
So Marine GeoGarage is and will be sustainably FREE but you need to pay a monthly subscription if you want to access the UK/Canada/Australia charts (and in a next future some other Hydrographic Services additional charts).
The reason is because Marine GeoGarage is required to royalty fees to display them online.



What Marine GeoGarage changes is the concept of nautical electronic charts viewing:
you don't "own" anymore the charts, just "use" them and share them, anytime, anywhere you are via computer, mobile phone or any other Internet enabled personal device.
The Cloud computing part of the service provides some resources in back-end to ensure regular processes for updating the charts.

Enjoy !

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