LiveSide - News blog : Maps

Bing Maps Imagery & Map Data Release, July 2009

Sunshine — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:59:41 GMT

41TB of new satellite imagery, aerial photography and vector data covering 189,000+ square kilometers of Earth including 12,000+ square kilometers of Bird’s Eye photography has just been added to Bing Maps.

So go on to the Bing Maps World Tour, there’s lots of new stuff to see!

Just want to know if your town is added? Head on down to the Bing Maps Blog for a full list.

The BBC Goes Big On Bing Maps

Sunshine — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:23:49 GMT

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) sure loves Bing Maps. They didn’t publish one, not two, not three but eleven Bing map applications so far!

There’s allsorts varying from an overview of the Berkshire Floods to an Irish Language Map and a request to save the sounds of the World. Sports lovers are served very well too, no matter if you love Tennis, Rugby or Running. Film lovers scoot on over to the Cannes 2009 Map and if politics is your thing, well there’s some of that too.

A full list of all the applications, and a description of each, can be found on the Bing Maps Blog.

Bing Maps: A revealing discussion on Ch. 9

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:46:21 GMT

Charles Torre and Erik Meijer spent an hour talking to Bing Maps infrastructure architect Gur Kimchi for an episode of Expert to Expert on Channel 9, and crammed a lot of information and a few juicy tidbits into the session.

According to Kimchi, the Bing Maps for Enterprise, what up until a few weeks ago was known as Virtual Earth, is a team of some 600, with 260 developers (of which 1/3 hold PhDs). He recalls the early days of VE, going all the way back to a Think Week paper in 2005, called “Virtual Earth”. Kimchi describes the premise of the paper:

“Imagine if you had mapping, search, and flight simulator, and what could happen”

An interesting note, as Flight Simulator has seemingly been dropped by Microsoft “to align Microsoft’s resources with our strategic priorities”. Maybe it’s reading too much into the inference, but might we see this Think Week dream come to life? Will Flight Simulator live again in Bing Maps? (or at least using Bing Maps imagery?)

The discussion then moves to the whiteboard, where Kimchi draws up some of the basic architecture, and compares the infrastructure with Google:

All of Virtual Earth, end to end is about 1900 servers…

Each drop of Google Earth in each of their 22 to 25 data centers has over 15,000 servers, literally a couple of magnitudes away in terms of efficiency

(slightly paraphrased)

Of course Google Maps is much more popular at this point than Bing Maps, but the efficiencies built into the architecture are impressive.

Kimchi then pulls out the “long tail” diagram and discusses some of the business decisions about where to commit to high resolution imagery and low latency (sorry Australia). He hints at how PhotoSynth, which is now part of the Bing Maps team and has some rudimentary integration now, might make use of user generated content to produce automated 3D models, especially in some of those long tail scenarios.

And in one last hint on what may be to come for Bing Maps, Kimchi reveals that a team is working on a “very early” project to allow for queries of map information over time. Much of the historical data from the past isn’t digitized and would be difficult and expensive to make available, but the architecture of the system does allow for versioning, so historical information once it was input could be queried, potentially.

All in all an interesting discussion. Check it out.

Bing Maps Imagery Release – May 2009 (Introducing Bing Maps World Tour)

Sunshine — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:19:04 GMT

This month’s release contains 248,000+ sq. kilometers of new imagery. But not just that. You won’t get a ginormous list of locations but an experience, an experience in the form of the Bing Maps World Tour.

The Bing Maps World Tour is hosted on Windows Azure and is built with the Bing Maps Silverlight Control (currently in CTP) to take advantage of the robust rendering capabilities within. Each month this tour will feature the latest imagery additions/updates to Bing Maps. You can sit back and watch the Slideshow, or explore it for yourself by navigating the pins.

A detailed description of the application’s features, and the list by country with sq. kilometers, can be found on the Bing Maps Blog.

Enjoy!

WorldMaps And Microsoft Virtual Earth

Sunshine — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:50:44 GMT

Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Evangelist, added a little Non-Virtual Earth map to his blog. What?! A non-VE map, what’s up with that? Well this WorldMap can also display a Virtual Earth map! Thanks to Chris Pendleton:

…What was most interesting is that as I was discovering this whole WorldMaps/ClustrMaps thing this guy from inside Microsoft was talking about WorldMaps on one of the internal aliases. So, I emailed him and said, "DUDE! You're Microsoft. Why don't you use Virtual Earth maps?!?" Well, that was a good idea so he did it. And, now WorldMaps is available in both his static map and Virtual Earth map views. Money.

That "he" is Brian Hitney, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist out of North Carolina who runs the Structure Too Big site. The service is free to sign up and all you need to do is drop a little map image (some HTML) on your page and his service will track all of the IPs requesting the image and produce a report for you.

Curious, I decided to add this map to my site too (you will find it at the bottom).

So how to get one? First off you will need to register for this beta-service. Registration is required to protect access to the data. E-mail addresses are never sold, and used only to notify users of service changes. After registration you will be sent an email with a link to activate your account. Once that’s done navigate to the MyWorldMap Account page, there you fill in your website’s url and optional the Longitude and Latitude of where you are. The links you can use to display the map on your page will also be displayed there. Now simply add one of these to your website and you’re done!

This is what the thumbnail one looks like, including WorldMap rank (a ranking against other WorldMap users). You can choose 3 formats or, if you only want to use it for your private tracking needs, choose to place an invisible “tracking pixel” image.

You can also link the image to your report page if you wish to do so. I’ve done so on my site, so if you click on my WorldMap there (you can click the image to the left here to go to my site), you will be able to see some more information on where my visitors come from.

Once on the report page you will notice it shows a static map, not a Virtual Earth one. Click on the Virtual Link above the map to switch. In future it will be possible to show the VE one by default.

Lovely Virtual Earth Map! The blue dot shows you where I’m located (no no, not my full home addy, I limited the coordinates to my Hometown :P ). Right below the map are the stats, not much there now since I’ve only added it today… Once I’ve had some visitors green, yellow and red icons will depict traffic levels as Chris explains in his article.

All an all very interesting, and free too! Get your WorldMaps today.

First of Many New Live Developer Articles

John OBrien — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:22:17 GMT

Hello fellow LiveSide readers, my name is John O'Brien. Its my second season as a Windows Live Developer/Platform MVP and I'm pleased to announce many new developer related articles in the works for your reading pleasure here at LiveSide. Today I published Create a Deep Zoom Panorama with Windows Live on the Developer Blog.

Its a how to guide for taking a Panorama Photo, stitching in Windows Live Photo Gallery, crunching in Deep Zoom Composer, uploading to Silverlight Streaming and display on top a Virtual Earth map. I hope you enjoy the read, I had fun making it, even the 5am trip out to the Story Bridge here in my home city of Brisbane, Australia.

Live Search Maps adds traffic for 3 Canadian cities

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:09:40 GMT

Just in from our friends at Windows Live Chronicles, traffic info has been added for 3 Canadian cities: Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal - so now Phunky can detour around that black line near downtown.

Version 2 of the Mobile Search application released

Chris — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 05:49:00 GMT

A new version of the Mobile Search application for Windows Mobile, Java-enabled phones and Blackberry's is now available. New features in the client application (http://wls.live.com) include:

Movie times
Traffic directions and GPS integration
Cache option to save map imagery to a storage card
Local Search now features user reviews

The browser search available at http://m.live.com has also been updated. Check it out if you can't install the Mobile Search application as both of these are extremely useful products. Currently the applications are limited to the US and UK, with certain features such as traffic still US only.

Read more on the VirtualEarth team blog.

Instant Answers adds maps and traffic info

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 09:47:00 GMT

Do a search in Live.com or MSN.com, and as of today, if you type in an address you should get an inline interactive map as the first answer, according to the Virtual Earth / Live Maps blog.

(click to enlarge)

The new Instant Answers feature extends to traffic information as well, for cities that feature it. Typing "traffic Seattle", or "commute Chicago" will provide instant traffic information, although the info will be a snapshot and will not update in real time on the search page (although it will in a sidebar gadget, of course). The maps are fully interactive however, and pan, zoom, and even aerial imagery are supported.

Metro area traffic currently supported include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.

New search site - Imagine Live Search

Chris — Thu, 17 May 2007 05:27:00 GMT

A new Live Search site was brought to our attention recently (thanks Jamie), http://search.imagine-live.com/. What's obviously different is the sparse homepage, notably the lack of vertical search options, which directs the users focus to the search box and nothing else.

Diving in further, search results are different too. There are no vertical search options present under the search box, however they appear in the right hand column with suggested results pre-populated. Users can see the results from these other search options alongside the main web search results, allowing users to quickly refine their query as they become more aware of what each search option offers them.

Screenshot (click to enlarge)

While the related searches option is already present on the main Live Search site, the addition of Image Search and News Search is a nice touch. The great part is that Windows Live Maps is embedded, auto-detecting your location and presenting local search results based on your query. Features such as panning and zooming are also enabled. This could have several useful applications, notably for search queries where the combination of web search for reviews and local search for accessibility is key, eg restaurants or nights out.

As Jamie noticed though, the page does have a few downsides. The Live Maps shows your location, not a location specified in your search, eg London restaurants. Additionally the site has been having loading problems, and results aren't always available.

I asked Mira Lane from the Core Search team (not to be confused with Windows Live Core) about the site, here's what she had to say:

"We call this the 'assisted trial page'. We send a small portion of our marketing traffic (from banner ads and such) to this site to give them more context to learn about search. There are no ads, for example, and instead we have a small flash tour. It's not a product feature or indicative of any product team direction or thinking."

With Google just announcing its Experimental Search pages, (Danny Sullivan has the details) the move towards "universal search" is definitely an upcoming area, even if this site isn't it for Microsoft. Try the "Right-hand contextual search navigation" and Imagine Live Search and let us know your thoughts.

Mix 07 Set to begin: what to expect

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:38:00 GMT

Mix 07, the Microsoft sponsored web developers conference in Las Vegas begins with registration tonight and the Ray Ozzie/Scott Guthrie keynote set for 9:30 PDT tomorrow (Monday April 30). So what to expect? Well lots of news and in depth coverage of a whole new set of APIs (application programming interfaces, a way for programmers to request services from a computer system or program that would otherwise be unavailable to them). New APIs have been announced for Virtual Earth/Live Maps, and for Spaces, and expect more to come from Live.com, Messenger, and others.

The big non-Windows Live news will of course be around Silverlight, formerly called WPF/e (Windows Presentation Foundation/everywhere), but Windows Live will be featured prominently, as well.

The Ray Ozzie keynote will be webcast live on Monday morning, we'll be watching and have a full report:

Ray Ozzie Keynote at MIX07
April 30, 2007
9:30 a.m. PDT / 12:30 p.m. EDT
In an address from Las Vegas at the MIX07 Web conference, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and Developer division General Manager Scott Guthrie will discuss the full breadth of Microsoft’s developer vision and roadmap for Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-platform application for delivering the next generation of media experiences.
View Live Webcast:

100K
300K
500K

In addition, many of the sessions will be webcast as well, you can check out the particulars at http://visitmix.com

3.8 Terabytes of new stuff at Live Maps/Virtual Earth - including Birds Eye for Chicago

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:58:00 GMT

A quick note posted today on the Live Maps / Virtual Earth blog announcing a major imagery release, including Birds Eye imagery for Chicago, along with "dozens of other cities, including tons of European imagery".

The Live Maps guys posted a Collection of landmarks to get us started

Here's the Goodman Theatre, where my brother works ;).

http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=yp.YN272x5435972

The blog promises more information soon, and we'll have that for you as news filters out about the release.

Microsoft becomes even more mobile with Tellme

Matthew — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 16:19:00 GMT

Microsoft is clearly investing in more mobile technologies by announcing Thursday that they will be purchasing Tellme Networks. Founded in 1999, Tellme is a provider of voice-enabled services, which include their free service +1 800 555 TELL [8355], as well as customer service and ordering for companies such as Merrill Lynch, E*TRADE, American Airlines, among others. Tellme has the largest and most reliable VoiceXML platform in the world, providing voice applications for a number of Fortune 500 companies. In fact they provide automated information [411] service for large carriers such as AT&T and Verizon. They will even send information via text message from the voice application or by sending an SMS to 83556 [TELLM], for example "pizza san jose".

Tellme has in fact used Microsoft's MapPoint technology for their voice guided driving directions. Although the financial terms have not been disclosed, Tellme will continue to run operations in Mountain View, CA and executives from the company are expected to join Microsoft.

Microsoft and Tellme share a vision around the potential of speech as a way to enable access to information, locate other people and enhance business processes, any time and from any device. Combining Tellme’s talented people and expertise in high-volume voice services with Microsoft’s platform, resources and worldwide customer reach will inspire new and innovative solutions. "Speech is universal, simple and holds incredible promise as a key interface for computing," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. "Tellme brings to Microsoft the talent, technology and proven experience in speech that will enable us to deliver a new wave of products and revolutionize human-computer interaction."

Certainly Microsoft is going to be heavily investing in a wide range of products given Gates' vision of seamless computing across devices. With products like Windows Live and MSN Mobile, Live Search mobile, Windows Live "G2" client, Palm Treo running Windows Mobile, upcoming Windows Mobile 6, and now Tellme: Microsoft is really trying to win the mobile market.

For more information, check out the PressPass article, which has audio from the teleconference, as well as the press page on Tellme, which has a number of other news articles [they seem pretty excited about the deal].

@Matthew

Live Maps traffic gadget for Windows Vista Sidebar available for download

Chris — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:20:00 GMT

After blogging about this nifty Windows Vista sidebar gadget a little while back, its now available for download on Windows Live Gallery. Even though the purpose of the gadget is pretty clear, Nathan Weinberg has a detailed post describing the in-and-outs. Dennis Cheung thinks that traffic is worse on Valentine's Day than other days, but with this Live Maps traffic gadget installed, you'll be ahead of the game.

Although this is an official gadget, it was created by Donavon West. Great work as usual and probably the first Windows Live gadget of many. If you have any feature suggestions for this gadget please leave them in the comments below.

Live Maps traffic gadget for Windows Vista sidebar

Chris — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:21:00 GMT

For those of you running Windows Vista, a new sidebar gadget is soon to be released that displays Live Maps traffic data on your desktop. Featuring the standard Maps features such as panning and zooming, this is a must-have if you drive frequently in any of the cities it includes. Zoom out is only to a city level though, so if you're city is not on the list you won't be able to find much use for the gadget. No international support either as traffic data is currently limited to the US, but we don't expect that from a v1 product anymore.

It's great to finally see an official Windows Live gadget, so hopefully it won't be the last. Integration between Windows Vista and Windows Live is definitely a good thing, so more is better.

We'll post the download link once its up at the Windows Live Gallery, or you can subscribe to the Windows Vista gadgets feed.