With the impending release of the much anticipated teen vampire romance, Twilight: New Moon , the Bing team has put together The Virtual Twilight Tour , a blood-sucking fun application for you to view an exclusive Twilight video tour brings Forks, La Push, Port Angeles, and Volterra right to your computer so that you can see 16 of Twilight’s and New Moon’s most exciting locations, such as the Cullen house , Fork’s Police Station , Fork’s Hospital , Bella Italia , the dress shop , the book store , and the high school , where you can also take a virtual tour . Just scroll over the Bing Map for location-based navigation and check out the Bing searches in the mix. There’s...
If you’re in the UK and go to Bing Maps via Bing.com/maps you will get redirected to Multimap.com…or, at least you would’ve until now. Going to Bing Maps will take you to the new Bing Maps experience in the UK. We’ve introduced a slough a features just for the UK market (and some shared with the US market). Also, for those who still want the Multimap.com experience you can still access it directly via Multimap.com ; however, over the next few weeks you will be asked if you’d like try the new Bing Maps experience instead – I’d advise you try it. Once you go Bing, you never go…wait. Never mind. Check out the features. Redesigned Navigation –...
Planning on entering NAVTEQ’s LBS Challenge ? Planning on using Bing Maps ? You should probably tune into my session to get the skinny on how the heck you’re going to do that. See my blog post, “ Bing Maps Globally Sponsors NAVTEQ’s 2010 LBS Challenge .” Register for my web cast on the NAVTEQ’s Network for Developers Live Meeting site scheduled for next Tuesday, November 17 @ 9AM PST – write that down. I’ll get into the different aspects of how use Bing Maps for web and mobile, talk about some coding opportunities and discuss the possibility of using Silverlight on Windows Mobile. Building Location-based Applications with Bing Maps This webinar...
A bit of an early surprise for my friends who are at Tech Ed Europe 2009 with me. In this special drop of imagery for Bing Maps we focus on, guess where…Europe! And, mostly Eastern Europe. Yesterday, while at Tech Ed Europe, I met with journalists from Norway, UK, Czech Republic, Spain, Croatia, Russia and Austria and most of them asked when we’ll have better imagery / photography in their respective countries. Well, at least I can make a few of them happy. Below, you’ll find the information for this release…all 178,720 square kilometers of it. And, as always, check out the full details on the Bing Maps World Tour Application . Bulgaria (1,225 sq. km) Czech Republic...
If you visited Bing Maps today you may have noticed a new look and feel. Well, that’s because it has a new look and feel. Specifically, the navigation bar is now black to match the Bing color set. Well, that’s the obvious change; however, I’ll go ahead and provide you with a list of new features you may not notice right off the bat. Draggable Routes – Yes! This is a great (and much requested) feature added to Bing Maps allowing you to generate a route, then in the case that you need to change the route, you can simply grab any part of it and drag it to where you want the route to actually go. To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the...
After months of residing online as a community technology preview (CTP), the Bing Maps Silverlight Control (Version 1.0) has arrived and the .dlls are ready for your grubby, coding hands and vividly, creative minds to start bringing to life the next generation of location-based applications. The Bing Maps Silverlight Control adds stunning aesthetic, unmatched performance and an innovative revolution to an already strong arsenal contained under the Bing Maps Platform’s umbrella. Let’s skip the marketing jazz and go straight for the gusto – what’s in the Bing Maps Silverlight Control v. 1? Enter bullet list… Everything from the CTP was brought forward including support...
I mentioned in my “Bing Maps Silverlight Control 1.0 Released” blog post that we altered the Bing Maps terms of use and it would require a post all on its own. Well, here’s why. We’ve made a bunch of changes which makes things easier to understand, easier to use and easier to get started. The way the mapping industry grew up, depended on counting transactions. A transaction is either (a) a geocoding request/response, a routing request response, a search request response or 8 map tiles (256 x 256 pixels). Transactions still have their place for stateless APIs, but we’re moving on by introducing the concept of a session. Sessions will be used with the Bing Maps AJAX...
The Scottish Government launched their Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) site which identifies small area concentrations of multiple deprivation across all of Scotland in a fair way and allows effective targeting of policies and funding where the aim is to wholly or partly tackle or take account of area concentrations of multiple deprivation is now using a Bing Maps Silverlight interface to visualize their data. The SIMD Interactive Bing Map is a mapping tool which can be used to identify Scotland's most deprived areas and their location within each local authority area . Now, this is a perfect example of an application that would require a Bing Maps Silverlight interface. There is just a...
For the past years, I’ve worked closely with Yellow Pages (owned by AT&T Interactive) getting Bing Maps onto their Yellow Pages.com web site; however, they’ve also been working on some mobile applications that use Bing Maps. You can see the applications from your mobile browser at http://m.yp.com . I was able to commandeer a video from them that illustrates all of the offerings from the mobile side of the house. Sorry, it’s a You Tube video . :-/ The Yellow Pages mobile site includes several features from Bing Maps – road maps, layering pushpins on the maps, aerial photos, traffic information and driving directions. Now, I just traded in my T-Mobile Dash for something...
Up for a challenge? Got a killer idea for the next great mobile or web, location-based application? Wanna win some killer prizes to propel your application into the spotlight? For the first time, Microsoft’s Bing Maps is sponsoring the developer-focused NAVTEQ LBS Challenge a location-based contest for developers to strut their stuff and vie for the opportunity to go big on their ideas with funding from some of the biggest names in the industry. Take your application to primetime and become the next LiveCast , Skyhook Wireless or Navman – all previous winners of the LBS Challenge. What is the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge ? Scraping from their web site, the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge focused...
MSN is getting an overhaul. We just launched a new version of the portal site and I must say it looks much cleaner. See for yourself: http://preview.msn.com/ . And, if you’re looking for Bing Maps , you’ll have to either search for something location related in the Bing Search box or go to the “More” tab. I guess we’re just a bit of a red-headed step-child for now…no offense to red-headed step-children. For full details on all of the features, check out the MSN Blog . CP - Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton
We just shipped another 9,460 square kilometers of imagery onto Bing Maps . This month’s release showcases high precision imagery for the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom. The biggest drop by far was Greater Vancouver Metro…I wonder why. Hmm? Anyone up for a little curling in Canada? O Canada! In any case, it’s all 15-30 centimeter resolution imagery, so it’s pretty stunning. We also released a refresh of the mobile tile set for vector (road) maps....more on that in another post. You can check out the full details of the release on the Bing Maps World Tour application which allows you to sit back and let the application give you a guided tour of the new imagery; or...
Now, I’ve seen some cool newscasts with Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth), but I’ve got some new eye candy to help boost your weatherman’s ratings. The Weather Network in Canada has integrated Bing Maps into their weathercasts and it is, simply put – sick. Watch this weather broadcast video (in Silverlight) and check out the Virtual Earth / Bing Maps 3D integration with animated weather right in the 3D control and temperatures layered over the map itself ( click map to view video ). I love the animated rain and lighting. We should do that! Hmm. Well, did you know you could build robust eye candy with the Bing Maps 3D Managed Control without using the AJAX APIs? Oh yeah...
The MapPoint Team will be available for you bending their ears at the SQL Server Pass Summit this year in Seattle, WA from November 2-5. If you’re a SQL Server expert and want to extend your use of the spatial indexing capabilities by adding visualization outside of the Dundas maps provided with Visual Studio, you may want to stop by the MapPoint kiosk at this show and talk with the experts who provide geospatial data visualization in MapPoint 2010 . Specifically, you should read my blog entry “ SQL Server and MapPoint 2009, Together At Last .” At this conference, the MapPoint team will have (1) a kiosk in the Microsoft booth, (2) Eric Weitzman (creator of the SQL Server Add...
Weather.com added Bing Maps as its default mapping platform back when it was Microsoft Virtual Earth (and back when I was writing the Virtual Earth and MapPoint B2B blog! ); however, they’ve continued to innovate and just recently added the ability to view “Futures” on the map. Futures are essentially a predictive model overlain and animated over the top of the Bing Map embedded into the web site. I added a screen shot; however, for best viewing you’ll want to go to the Weather.com web site and check it out . The way this is done, since they are using a Flash interface, is to create a transparent tile overlay with the predictive weather data models drawn as ~20 different...
