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Everyscape battles Google, lives to sell

For a startup that started out competing with Google Inc.’s near-ubiquitous Google Street View feature, Everyscape Inc. of Waltham, Mass., is doing very well.
With 50 employees, Everyscape will move at the end of August into new headquarters in Newton that will accommodate a doubling in size. Last week news leaked out of a deal it inked with AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) to provide 3-D photo tours of business interiors on AT&T’s yellowpages.com directory site.
EveryScape founder Mok Oh declined to talk about the AT&T deal, but said EveryScape has done well by abandoning initial plans to do photo-realistic 3D tours of streetscapes, and instead focusing on business interiors. The company’s core technology, developed at MIT, lets it provide interior tours that seem realistic, but don’t take hours to download.
Oh demonstrated how the company’s interior tours glide from one 3D room image to the next. “That’s the secret sauce,” he said. “You want to be able to maintain people’s orientation as they travel.”
In February, EveryScape raised a $6 million Series C round of financing led by a strategic investor, Sout Korean mobile operator SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM). SK, which joined existing investors Dace Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Launchpad Venture Group, plans to expand the service to Asia, Oh said.

Read more: Everyscape battles Google, lives to sell – Boston Business Journal