Currently, Microsoft Virtual Earth has high-resolution aerial imagery for nine major French cities and bird’s-eye imagery (45-degree angle) for 43 towns and cities in France. The BD ORTHO® aerial imagery, available in May 2008, will build on the existing Virtual Earth platform by expanding aerial imagery to the entire French territory and allowing users to zoom and pan at a higher resolution than before. IGN is the only French organisation able to provide seamless aerial imagery with 100 per cent coverage of the French territory.

In addition, aerial imagery of the entire French coastline and 45 kilometres (km) inland will be available on the Virtual Earth platform at an even higher resolution than the inland imagery. This is significant given that France was the world’s No 1 tourist destination, with 78 million foreign tourists in 2006.1 The coastal aerial imagery will be available on the Virtual Earth platform to organisations such as those in the tourism sector, and also to prospective tourists, allowing them to virtually explore the French coastline, architecture and amenities before visiting.

“We are happy that Microsoft Virtual Earth has turned to IGN to acquire its aerial imagery and take advantage of its expertise in this area,” said Patrice Parisé, IGN’s new general manager. “This partnership is testament to the quality of IGN’s geographical data.”

IGN will license its BD ORTHO aerial imagery to Microsoft Virtual Earth for five years. The partnership will allow the following imagery to be made available in Virtual Earth:

• Seamless aerial imagery of the entire French territory, including overseas territories, at 2.5 metres per pixel (m/pixel) resolution — available in Virtual Earth by early May 2008
• Aerial imagery with a 45 km coastal margin at a greater resolution of 1 m/pixel — available in Virtual Earth before the end of summer 2008
• Aerial imagery at an ultra-high resolution (50 centimetres per pixel) in urban areas of France with more than 50,000 inhabitants — available in Virtual Earth before the end of summer 2008
• IGN will also license its digital terrain model, BD Alti®, to Microsoft, allowing topography of the entire French territory at 25 metres to be illustrated in Virtual Earth 3D — available this summer

“Microsoft is committed to delivering the highest quality product for Virtual Earth customers, government organisations and consumers in France, and this imagery agreement is a significant investment helping to achieve this commitment in France,” said Erik Jorgensen, general manager of Mapping and Location Services at Microsoft.

Microsoft Virtual Earth is present at Geo-événement 2008, 9 April, where Arnaud Gstach will deliver a presentation titled “Localise, Integrate, Innovate!” and will present the IGN aerial imagery to be made available in Virtual Earth.

The French search engine marketing sector is growing very rapidly, but from a much smaller base than say Scandinavia or the United Kingdom.  One of the factors influencing this is that the French had an electronic telephone directory called ‘Minitel’ quite some time before the Internet was being used in other countries.  This delayed the uptake of the web and French search engines putting France behind other major western countries.

However, the use of the internet in France is taking off very rapidly indeed and it’s not a market to be ignored.

The top three International search engines in France are:

Google

MSN / Live Search

Yahoo

Other top search engines in France include:

• AOL
• Voila
• Orange
• Free
• Alice
• Lycos

*Ranking based on the top 25 French properties in December 2007.
** Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

*Average share of total visits to online retail sites by French visitors for the period Oct 29 – Dec 23, excluding auction sites ** Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

The following figures shows that things are changing and that e-commerce is becoming a habit for french citizens (we are 63.5 mn accoding to a new census).

The evolution since 2006 is quite the same than a year before (in percentage).

Google market share in France is high, when I mean high, I mean sky high, astonishingly high … or whatever term you prefer to qualify a 90% market share (in visits, according to Xiti, a french web stats tool provider - based on 80K websites). The second one, Yahoo !, is only at … 3,2% and the first local company, Orange (biggest ISP in France), has a market share of 1,63%

And this figure is still rising (+ 1% over a year).

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs