Panomonkey.com Officially Launched Today at Where 2.0

360cities.net to Launch Panomonkey.com at O’Reilly Where 2.0 2011 

Prague, Czech Republic, 18 April 2011 – 360 Cities, the largest community of photographers creating 360-degree panoramic photos for the web, has taken another step towards mainstreaming panoramic photography by launching Panomonkey.com, a fully automated online panoramic photo stitching service. The service will be officially launched at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara on 20 April 2011.

Designed to stitch photos from any camera – from ordinary smart phone to high-end digital SLR with fisheye-lens – Panomonkey receives any number of uploaded source images and automatically stitches, renders, blends and color-corrects them to produce a high-quality finished panorama.

Jeffrey Martin, Founder of 360cities.net, said that Panomonkey, online in beta since late 2010, is the first such service to accommodate uploaded images from such a wide variety and types of cameras and lenses. “We’ve calibrated Panomonkey over months of development and trial and error to be extremely sensitive to lens type and the idiosyncrasies of the wide range of cameras out there today. We believe it is the only such service that can so intelligently detect the details of the hardware and use them to output a high quality panorama requiring no extra work for exposure, color, or error repair. No knowledge of photography, no special camera, and no software is required to create high-quality 360-degree photos.” 

Panomonkey users’ finished panoramas can be distributed via 360cities.net throughout its wider ecosphere. “This means that the capability to create 360- degree geo-referenced imagery and publish it easily to major mapping platforms can now be extended to millions and millions of people,” said Martin. “Vehicle-mounted street view type cameras can only do so much. By enabling anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection to push a finished high-quality 360-degree panorama out to the geosphere, we aim to fill in the huge gaps that street-view type photography on the web inevitably leaves,” he said.

About 360 Cities

360 Cities is dedicated to promoting geo-referenced, high-resolution spherical imagery by providing the best-anywhere platform for publishing panoramic photography on the web. 360Cities.net is the largest collection of spherical, map-based panoramas, and is a Premium Content Provider to Google Earth.

Contact: Jeffrey Martin – Founder, 360Cities.net, jeff (at) 360cities.net