Almost 100 journalists today "plunged" into our press conference at the Residence Palace to help us launch an exciting maritime adventure - Google Ocean. Google always has seen its mission in the broadest possible way to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We took another step toward this goal when we opened up a new frontier to the armchair web surfer with Ocean, which features satellite imagery, photos and videos of the planet's seas. The European Commission is contributing by providing its own marine data and Maritime Affairs Commissioner Joe Borg gave a brilliant speech praising the product and pledging to incorporate the Commission's Atlas of the Sea into it. We are delighted, of course, with the Commission's participation. Many public authorities remain hesitant about allowing private companies access to data. In particular, we've had difficulty getting public transport authorities to free up their data. The Commission is setting a positive example of public-private partnership, doing the most possible to disseminate publicly collected data as widely as possible. Ocean's launch here also underlined just how much Brussels has become a global media center. More journalists reportedly are based here than anywhere else in the world after Washington and we received more coverage from all around the globe. Newspapers that featured the Brussels launch of Ocean included Italy's La Stampa and La Republicca, Spain's La Opinion, Germany's Financial Times Deutschland and Stuttgarter Nachriten, France's Agence France Press, the Czech Republic's leading financial daily and many, many more. Pictures from Brussels event flashed around the world. Even major TV stations carried the event, including Germany's ZDF .Posted by William Echikson, Senior Communications Manager
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