Nearmap is aerial photography. The images are two dimensional....

Nearmap is aerial photography. The images are two dimensional. Very good for a lot of purposes (measuring the length and width of stuff). Google is attempting to take a lot of 2D images and create a 3D product out of it. I'm surprised they even bother. Taking 2D data and converting it to 3D usually involves a lot of error and you wouldn't want to plan any sort of infrastructure with it.

Pointerra is attempting to target something called LiDAR. LiDAR is a true three dimensional data capture. It's horizontal accuracy is similar to aerial photography, but its captured Z dimension (height) is very high precision (uses lasers). This makes it ideal for infrastructure planning, construction, survey, etc.

There are a lot of companies that target LiDAR. LiDAR is a notoriously tricky beast to deal with: It's the size of the data. The data, even conservatively, is 10x the size of aerial photography. This is where a lot of companies fail. People love the data and have all sorts of ideas with it. Everybody writes their own products to store and visualise the data.

One of the leading technologies in this space is Euclideon (euclideon.com). But last I heard they are all but broke - laid off everybody (including the marketing people!!??) a year or so ago. The problem with their technology was the data storage. It's bad enough storing LiDAR data, Euclideon's model was to create even more data (same size as LiDAR) and it takes way to long to convert it. The visuals were really great though. If Pointerra are trying to copy the Euclideon technology, they'll probably fail, for the same reason that Euclideon has.

I think there are better companies out there. It will entirely depend on their technical team and their experience with LiDAR. Are they people who have only played with the data for a couple of years and only seen a few terrabytes, or are they people who have dealt with it on a Government scale ( actually petabytes )?

I've tried digging up information regarding the tech team but there is not a lot of detail about them. Not a good sign.