The Microsoft Bing team has responded to this week’s catastrophic event in Haiti by working with satellite imagery provider, DigitalGlobe , to rapidly publish current imagery of Haiti captured by the company’s Quickbird and WordView II satellite sensors. The imagery collected by the satellites is respectively 60 and 50 cm accurate and covers much of Haiti but centers around Port-Au-Prince just 10-16 kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter and where the damage is extensive. The Bing Imagery Technologies team in Boulder, Colorado that is responsible for acquisition, processing and publishing of the imagery found in the Bing maps site, published this data in less than 16 hours...
Microsoft partner, IDV Solutions , recently released a new interactive application demo that visualizes vehicle collision data. The demo is built using their data visualization product-- Visual Fusion --and integrates Microsoft Silverlight and a stack of other Microsoft technologies that make up the Microsoft SingleView platform : Bing Maps , Sharepoint and SQL Server 2008 . SingleView brings together these Microsoft technologies to allow organizations to better manage their data and to collaborate around that data in a visual manner (thanks to Bing Maps!). It provides a consolidated, geo-spatial representation of an entire data and information landscape. You can deploy Microsoft SVP easily across...
The new imagery features that the community has been buzzing about on the new Bing Maps beta site are also available for developers on the Bing Maps Platform ! Chris Pendleton shares how to download the necessary DLLs on his blog today. Be sure to take a look for step-by-step instructions on getting and using those DLLs. BUT ... you can also see hear about all the latest and greatest from Bing Maps TODAY during the webcast Chris will be hosting. Get webcast information here . BETTER YET ... for those of you in the Reston, VA area ... it is not too late to register for the free Bing Maps Roadshow presentation at Microsoft's office there. See these features explained in person and get your questions...
Yesterday I reported on some fantastic new updates to the Bing Maps platform and advised you of an upcoming webcast that will focus on the new features and functionality. But those of you in the Reston, VA area can get a front row seat: as a reminder, Bing Maps is visiting Reston on December 14th from 1-5 PM. In addition to the agenda descibed in a previous blog post about the roadshow, we will be showcasing the new Bing Map features and how can integrate these capabilities into your applications. If you haven't already, register here for the event. -=Virtual Jerry
What a HUGE day for Microsoft Bing Maps! Not only did the Development team release 46.7 TB of new imagery but they also released a beta Silverlight version of Bing Maps with some pretty cool new features including a new Streetside mode that allows you to navigate fully stitched and continuous ground level photographs for a full 360 degree panoramic experience. There are many other great features that Bing Maps technical evangelist, Chris Pendleton, has covered in his blog entry today that you can read here and you can see videos on the topic here and here . But for a chance to look under the hood and see how to code your own cool mapping applications based on the Bing Maps Silverlight Control...
It would seem that Microsoft partner, ISC , is carving out quite a niche for themselves supporting agency economic development efforts through mapping applications that integrate the Microsoft Bing Maps platform and their MapDotNet UX platform. ISC recently developed an application for the Northwest Florida Rural Area of Critical Economic Concern (NW RACEC) that, as part of the requirements to receive stimulus funding, needed to include map graphics showing a number of different data spatially in their submissions to the Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). Data types included demographic data from the 2000 Census at the Tract, Block Group...
Bing Maps can be used to track everything from assets to fleets to family members to the Abominable Snowman (as Virtual Earth) and maritime crime. Piracy Watch is a demonstration application built on Visual Fusion 4.5, the latest release from Microsoft partner, IDV Solutions . Visual Fusion is visual mashup software for the enterprise, a platform for creating interactive, visual applications utilizing the power of Microsoft’s Bing Maps, SharePoint, and SQL Server. Piracy Watch visualizes piracy incidents around the globe from 1978 to the present, displaying the data in both a map and a timeline. The two contexts of place and time work together as an integrated canvas for exploring the data...
The Bing Maps Platform is all about the power of location—from enhancing existing applications with maps and address validation, to creating completely new Web mapping solutions. With features such as locators, fleet/asset tracking, data visualization portals, location intelligence, and other recent improvements, the Bing Maps Platform brings location data to life by making it easier to visualize, understand, and analyze. Ø Explore Ways Bing Maps Can Benefit Your Business Join Bing Maps experts, as they provide an overview of how the Bing Maps Platform can be a powerful visualization tool for geographic and location–based information. Learn solution implementation and best...
Bing Maps got a new look and today as well as peformance enhancements and new features that include a new Silverlight Control, Draggable Routes, a new Zoom bar and other new navigation buttons, Command Parsing, Word Wrapping, and the ability to embed a Bing Map directly into your web site. For details on these new features and the performance enhancements, see Chris Pendleton's write-up . We also have an annoucement video that speaks to this release. What I want to elaborate on are the changes to our terms of use. The new licensing now allows for free transactions for Education and non-profit organizations, and for small Web sites, including Goverment! The web sites must be public, non-password...
I am at the GEOINT 2009 conference in San Antonio, Texas, extolling the virtues of Bing Maps and the Virtual Earth Server to the geospatial intelligence crowd. "The Virtual Earth WHAT?" you may ask. Microsoft's geospatial subsidiary, Vexcel Corporation , offers an scalable standalone appliance solution that includes the Bing Maps basemap imagery, geocoding, map control and APIs for private and classified networks (read: no internet connection). The product was first introduced at this same confernece in 2008 prior to rebranding of Virtual Earth to Bing Maps, hence the Virtual Earth reference. The company has recently announced version 2 of the server, that now includes enterprise tools for integrating...
I had the pleasure of attending the International Economic Development Conference held last week in Reno, Nevada. The conference brought together roughly 1200 economic development professionals, all looking to better understand how to help local businesses grow and how to better stimulate business development in their regions. I was joined in the Microsoft booth by my colleague Kevin Adler, geospatial solutions specialist for the Bing Maps team, where we showed attendees how data visualization through Bing Maps can provide at-a-glance understanding of demographic and census data, and how the crisp and clear aerial views can help demonstrate regional quality of life to businesses in the site selection...
Since writing my last blog entry about the Illinois Dept of Transporation using Bing Maps for reporting ARRA funded projects, it has come to my attention that the Texas DoT has exapnded their use of Bing Maps to also provide tracking of projects planned for the agency's 2010 fiscal year, some stimulus funded, others from more traditional sources such as bonds. The application can be found here . When you visit the site, you are given the option to search by TxDOT district or by Texas county. Once you have specified your search, a results page similar to the below is displayed with data coming from an XML table. If you take a look at the legend, you can see that projects are identified by project...
Readers of this blog, since the time it was named VIrtual Earth for Government, know that Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) has been adopted by a number of Department of Transporation agencies that have recognized it as a great platform for building public facing applications, typically to provide citizens with information on road and travel conditions. To date, the list includes Kansas , Louisianna , Ohio , Texas , Seattle , Virginia and the Federal Department of Transporation . Now Illinois DoT has jumped on the bandwagon but in an interesting way. IDOT is not yet using Bing Maps to help travelers visualize travel conditions across the state but in the spirit of Gov 2.0, to provide transparency...
If you have been reading this blog for some time now, you are probably familiar, to some degree, with the MapIt product offered by Microsoft partner, ESRI. If not, here is a quick run down: MapIt combines software with services to enable businesses to create maps displaying enterprise data, otherwise typically stored in spreadsheets and tabular formats. To do this, it connects Microsoft technologies that include: SQL Server 2008 and Excel — Prepare and publish your enterprise data for mapping. Silverlight and WPF— Develop rich Web and desktop mapping applications. SharePoint — Share maps with the out-of-the-box, configurable SharePoint Web Part. Visual Studio — Create...
When is Bing Maps more than an awesome platform for building data visualization applications? When it is combined with Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. When this happens, your mapping applications become collaborative tools that allow information to be shared across your organization, by all stakeholders including remote personnel. Add a Sharepoint portal to a Bing Maps application and your personnel can share and dynamically alter map layers through web parts right in the application interface. Want to learn more? Take a look at this upcoming webcast from the Bing Maps team: Viewing your business data in an efficient, intuitive way is key to your organization's success. When you use Bing...
