Via Virtual Earth

GeoPlace has a Quick Take review of Virtual Earth from Malcolm Williamson form the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at U Arkansas. Some good insight here, especially for developers looking to get started with the VE SDK.?

Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse? For real action?check out The Pod Cast Networks Double Feature with John Curlander and Quinn Norton on Virtual Earth and Body Hacking respectively. Recorded at Last Weeks Etech.

Tesco, one of the worlds largest retailers, has migrated their web locator app to Virtual Earth.

Last week, the Gadget Show on Five in the UK broadcast a look at how Birds Eye Imagery is acquired for Virtual Earth. You can have a look at a 2 page summary of the segment on their website and you can view the 3 minute?video here. For a general audience tech piece, they manage to get some interesting factoids about Birds Eye in there. Very cool that the host, Jon Bentley,?got to go up in one of the 5 camera rigs to check it out in person.

Here's a look at Jon pointing at his studio window in Birds Eye and in real life :-) They must have?shot this segment a few months back as you can see the old Brady Bunch navigation grid in there.??

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Yesterday Microsoft Research announced the winners of the 2007 academic research grants. Here is the press release about the program, for which over a million dollars was awarded to researches?in 2 broad areas -??Real time/real world data acquisition in SensorMap?and digital geography, 3D graphics, and computer vision in applications related to terrain and cityscapes.?

A very sincere congratulations to the winners, who you can meet here and review their proposals. I was one of the reviewers of the submissions and can honestly say it was very humbling reading all of the brilliant?proposals and having to choose the best of the best. There were no duds among them, each attempting to tackle some very difficult problems.

On a different subject completely, here's my favorite birds eye shot of the week at BET - a fantastic shot of a jet very low over a residential neighborhood.

Note - I updated this post to reflect the proper name for the website - Live Search Maps. I had been incorrectly referring to the website as Live Maps in my blog posts.?Sorry about any confusion I may have caused.

This afternoon a new release of Live Search Maps was launched, the sixth major rev since July 7, 2005 when V1 went out. Among the new feature items?are a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements to existing functionality. For some of the big items, like GeoRSS publishing of Collections, I?ll have separate blog posts this week to drill in on details. In the meanwhile, here is a list of all of the new and improved features to get you started.

Firefox support for 3D mappingIf you?re running Firefox 1.5 or later or Windows, the VE3D control is now supported. It is a Netscape style plugin developed using NPAPI and hosts the VE3D managed control. In Live Search Maps, click the 3D button on the navigation dashboard to launch the setup to either install or update 3D functionality. The setup process itself has been streamlined for both IE and Firefox users ? It?s a lot smarter about dependency checks and component installation. Regardless of which browser you use, you only need to run the setup once and you?ll be able to go into 3D view in either browser. Memory management and cache performance has been improved in this release of 3D, providing a better overall experience for exploration.

The Space Navigator from 3D Connexion is also supported now in 3D view. Space Navigator is an innovative input device optimized for moving around in 3d virtual spaces. As always, Virtual Earth also supports any game?controller that works with DirectX, such as the USB XBOX controller you probably have sitting around the house :-)

Ratings and Reviews of Business Listings and Details page enhancementsYou can now read reviews of businesses entered by other users, as well as adding your own ratings and reviews for any business in Live Maps. To get started do a search for businesses in the Yellow Pages like this search for Book stores, restaurants?and Supermarkets. Click on one of the listings to bring up its details page, like the one shown below for Bailey-Coy Books. There you can see the average user rating for the business and page through reviews?previously entered by others. We've partnered with sites like Judy's Book to feed thousands of?quality reviews into the system already. Of course you can contribute your own Rating and Review right there on the details page with the 'Write Review' button.?Had a good experience with a physical therapist? Tell?your neighbors about it. Tired of the overhyped bar in Belltown that's too crowded,?serves watered down drinks and takes a 10 dollar cover weeknights?even though?every other place on the block is free? Call em out on it..??

The Ratings and Reviews features are currently only available in the US market. Also on the Details page for a business, you will see suggested 'Find Nearby' follow up queries based on the business you are looking at. These suggested Yellow page queries show a preview of how many results for each category are available in your search area.?

Subscribe to a Collection via RSS.

RSS is a family of standard formats used to publish frequently updated content, such as blogs or news feeds. You can now subscribe to an RSS feed for a Collection so that you can be kept up to date as the author of the Collection adds new items. When you subscribe to a Collection?s feed, your RSS reader automatically receives updates as the author makes changes. For instance, if someone sends you a link to a Collection of their favorite Italian restaurants in your city, you may want to subscribe to the Collection?s feed to be kept up to date as the author adds more restaurants. There are many good RSS readers available ? some run in a web browser while others are applications that run on your PC. Live.com has very good RSS viewing built right in. In this screenshot to the right, you are looking at someone?s collection of??favorite restaurants in Seattle. If this is of interest to you, you can subscribe by clicking the Subscribe link?or RSS icon?and adding the feed to your favorite RSS reader. For the example Collection shown here, here is the normal permalink to view it in a web browser, and here is its?RSS feed to add it to your favorite news reader.

Live Search Maps is now a GeoRSS publishing tool as well!?Collection feeds are? GeoRSS compatible, meaning that they have special markup to encode the geographic information about each item in your collection into the feed. RSS readers that don?t understand this added information will gracefully ignore it, while Geo-enhanced feed consumers can us this information to present the feed on a map. This element of the feature is of great interest to application developers who use RSS as a means to pipe data from one?application to another. Collection data can now be easily accessed programmatically and consumed by any application that can parse and consume RSS/XML. Yahoo's Pipes, The Virtual Earth Map Control, and as of recently Google Maps are all good consumers of GeoRSS. The addition of the Geo information opens up a wide range of possibilities for developers.?For application developers interested in learning more about GeoRSS,?I suggest starting?at GeoRSS.org.?Mikel Maron, a key contributor to the shaping of the GeoRSS standard, maintains the Brainoff blog and is another good source of developer info. I'll follow up this week with a much more detailed post about GeoRSS and how to take advantage of this great new feature in Live Search Maps.

Area Calculations and Drawing EnhancementsEver wonder what the area of your property is? Or how large your town is? Now you can see the area of a shape you draw on the map in square feet, acres, square kilometers, etc? And as in previous releases, for lines you can see their length. To try it out, just use the drawing tools on the scratchpad. You can add a bunch of lines and shapes to a Collection, and when you share it with a friend they can see the area and distance measurements in the Collection Viewer.

While you are drawing your lines and shapes, if you reach the edge of the map it will smoothly scroll for you to make it easy to keep drawing without reaching for the keyboard. The cursor keys will pan the map during drawing as well, but most users find it more convenient to have the map scrolled automatically .

Drag n? drop re-ordering of items on the Scratchpad.

You can now hover over an item on the scratchpad and a mini toolbar will appear on the item. Grab the drag handle in the toolbar and drag the item to a new position in the list. If you need to move the item far in the list, it will auto-scroll for you when you reach the edge. This is a big convenience if you are managing a large collection and need to move a new item from its default location at the end of the collection up to the top of the list. If for instance you are maintaining a Collection of your top 50 favorite live music venues and want to move a new entry from its default position at the end of the list up to the top, this is now a snap.

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Traffic and Driving Directions EnhancementsWhen you create a route in Live Search Maps, traffic flow and incident information will automatically?display if your route is in a city where we have traffic information.?There is a link in the Directions window to toggle the traffic overlay off when it is no longer needed. This saves you from having to know if a city has traffic or not, and is a great reminder to check real-time traffic at the time you are planning your route. The Itinerary display has also undergone a face lift to improve readability of the instructions.

Address-Only GeocodingThis is a useful feature if you are looking up a lot of addresses in the same city, or your map?view is already?around the city you are searching.?In the past you always had to enter a full street address with city, state or?postcode information like this - 1200 madison ave, new york, NY.? Now, if your map view is already in NY, you can just enter the street address as 1200 Madison Ave, and Live Search Maps will?default to finding it in NY. ?

Live Search Maps for Outlook is UpdatedThis is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that brings maps, travel planning meeting enhancements and a bunch more location based features to Outlook. This release adds?support for?Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista. It also brings the 3D mapping experirence into Outlook - slick! You can Install it now from http://outlook.maps.live.com

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Note for DevelopersWe will be releasing V5 of the Virtual Earth Map Control shortly. Expect to see news here on this blog in 2 weeks or so introducing a host of new features in V5 of the Map Control and API, including updated documentation and samples in the SDK.

We hope you enjoy using this new release. Stay tuned here over the next few days for more in depth information on these features. As always, your feedback is most welcome - the team here is always listening and acting on your requests and bug reports.

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A few bits of online news to check out. Our own Bill Gail contributed to this piece at Space News - A National Earth-Information Initiative. From Bill:

I co-authored the article with Molly Macauley (Resources for the Future) and Neal Lane (Rice University Professor) advocating for a ?National Earth-Information Initiative?. ?It proposes a two-year effort to look at fundamentally restructuring how NASA, NOAA, and USGS perform Earth remote sensing and distribute Earth information to the public.

Government Computer newsposted this quick look at some of the progress Virtual Earth has made over the past year.

And for fun, check out navdog.com, a new site that lets you search for local events and add your own. Its brand new so there isn't a lot of content in there yet, but looks like a well done application.

I've been enjoying internal builds of the Third World plugin for VE for the past few months. It's really matured and will finally ship this week. If you're familiar with Second Life from Linden Labs you'll be right at home in Third World, a virtual world without limit. One of the major differences is that the space you live and interact in is actually the Virtual Earth, modeled after the real world you're already used to,?minimizing the learning curve. You can be productive in Third World in no time, meeting new friends and wandering around aimlessly for hours.?You can even go hang out in actual places that you know from the real world. Among the key differentiators in Third World:

• Integrates with existing Social Networks. No need to make new friends. MySpace, Tribe, and Friendster are initially supported.?Facebook integration will follow on shortly.
• Dyna-drobe. A dynamic wardrobe. you specify your preferences once, then Third World automatically changes your avatars outfit as you move from place to place. No more stopping at home on your way to dinner?after work to change.?We used geofencing algorithms to determine when you are near the new destination to trigger the wardrobe change.
• Transact with Flooz. We've partnered with the founders of Flooz to bring back the forgotten Web currency.?? You use your real world credit card to put Flooz in your Third World account, and from there you can participate in virtual commerce within the metaverse. And just about everything is bargain priced - you can pretend to sip a 4 dollar latte for only 20 Flooz which cost you only about a buck fifty of?real earth currency.??
• Adult-only spaces. Just as in the real world, Third?World has bars and clubs that are 21 and over. If a RW business is categorized as a bar in our business listing database, you'll be carded by a virtual thug on the way in. ?
• Child Safe spaces. Similarly, there are zones in Third World like schoolyard playgrounds and the big colorful ball pools at Chuck E Cheese where only kids under 12 are permitted.

I'll have more details and screen shots online after the launch this week. Which by the way is actually taking place inside Third World! It's going to be a huge event with Duran Duran and Staind performing live?and a keynote from Erik Jorgensen, General Manager of Virtual Earth. I'm sure this is going to sell out quick when tickets go on sale Monday as space is limited, so get your's quick. they're only?50 Flooz.??

"It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." - Abraham Maslow

A dangerous trap for software developers to fall into! Software development projects come in lots of different flavors, so we provide different developer tools optimized for many environments.?If you're building a SQL stored proc that needs to geocode new/updated records, a JavaScript library simply isn't the right tool. If you're building a Java based Web Service on Solaris?to expose a reverse geocoding API, a COM object is a very square peg for your round hole.?Microsoft offers three mapping and location services API's that work well on their own, but also integrate and work well together to provide a very rich mapping platform for just about any environment. This article will help steer you in the right direction in choosing the right SDK for your job. Lets start with an overview of each of our developer tools for Mapping, then I'll list some common projects and the appropriate tool for the situation. [as always, our MSDN dev center is your one stop to find more details on all of our developer stuff]

Microsoft's Mapping tools for Developers

1. Virtual Earth Map ControlThe VE map control is a javascript library for Web developers. It supports street geocoding, place finding, routing and driving directions, interactive street and aerial maps, birds eye imagery, data layers (GeoRSS and Collections), vector drawing, local search for businesses and much more in a client side control for Javascript/DHTML/AJAX developers. It is easy to integrate server side data for overlay on the VE map. If you are building a web application that calls for map visualization, this is the place to start. As you'll see in a moment, the VE map control works seamlessly with the MapPoint Web service to integrate sophisticated server side functionality from a web server running any OS.

More info: Feature details,?Interactive SDK, VE Developer Center,?Developer Discussion Forum, MapCruncher for?custom raster layers

Great for: mashups, 3D web mapping, Web applications that?need to present interactive maps and imagery.????

2. MapPoint Web ServiceMWS is a hosted Web Service API appropriate for any development environment with support for SOAP and WSDL. Visual Basic .NET, C#, Java, major Relational Databases, and most Web Application Servers all support SOAP. The API supports dynamic map rendering, driving directions in 9 languages, custom data sources, Find Nearby and Find Along Route, Geocoding and place finding, polygon rendering and much more. Unique to MWS is a rich web based application for Data management including batch geocoding and interactive management of your private?data sources.?Managing?and querying custom data sources with MWS and presenting the results in web applications with the VE control is a powerful and common combination for developers.

More Info: Feature details,?Online SDK, Discussion Forum, Dev Account Signup

Great for: development on any operating system, server to server applications, stored procedures in databases with WS support, non-web client interfaces?like WAP, mobile, voice, SMS, etc..., SharePoint Integration

3. MapPoint 2006 COM objectThe MapPoint control is included with MapPoint 2006 desktop mapping application. It is a COM/ActiveX object ideal for integration in Windows applications. Since it's store of map data is local, it is very unique among our developer tools?in that it can be used without a net connection. Among the controls strengths are advanced data import and visualization methods - It is easy to take demographic or sales data from a spreadsheet and create stunning data maps with almost no effort. Drive time polygon creation, dragable routes, ?GPS support, and territory management are among the power features.

More Info: MapPoint 2006, Free Trial, Developer documentation, object model, MP2k Magazine

Great for: Thematic mapping, shaded area maps, disconnected/offline applications, Sharepoint Integration?

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Hoping to inspire kids to pursue careers in aviation, 23 year old Barrington Irving took off this week on a 40 plus day flight around the world. His Experience Aviation website has the details and you can track his flight in realtime as well.

The Flight Sim team at Microsoft?are among Barrington's many sponsors for the flight and?assisted in getting the web based tracker online. Mike Singer from the Flight Sim team was at?Barrington's launch and writes about it here on his blog.?If you're a Flight Sim freak, there's lots of other good stuff for you there as well.?

John Curlander, GM of the Vexcel team in Boulder, presented a detailed history of how the 3D component of Virtual Earth was built. Information week has in depth coverage of the presentation on their blog and CNET has some more info here. Good stuff if the building of virtual worlds is of interest to you, a little on the nerdy side if not :-)

Related, as part of yesterdays imagery publish, our first 3D cities in Europe appeared. It's a modest first step, but you can expect a lot more real soon. Here is a Collection of the Euro 3D cities - Plymouth, Cardiff, Bristol, Gloucester, and Wolverhampton