April 2006 - Bing Maps Blog

1. 

   Solution Highlight: Zillow

   04/28/06 by Chris Pendleton | 1 Replies |

   Zillow.com, one of the web's premier sites for residential real estate, including finding the unique Zestimate™ price for a home, has recently added bird's eye imagery from the Virtual Earth platform. Today, they are only using bird's eye in a few of the supported cities, but they will support additional cities in the near future. The Virtual Earth Map Control integration allows Zillow's customers to not just see the roof of a building but to get a true perspective view--and see it from North, South, East, and West vantage points. So, check out Zillow --no sign up required.
2. 

   Solution Highlight: LoopNet

   04/27/06 by Chris Pendleton | 3 Replies |

   LoopNet, the #1 commercial real estate service online, recently launched a new map search service built on Virtual Earth. The LoopNet solution utilizes Virtual Earth to provide an autorefreshing query for commercial real estate based on the VE Map Control. That lets their customers use the map as an additional filter in their search, finding only properties in the exact areas they care about. The unique bird's eye imagery also lets users get a real perspective on 'what it's like there' as they investigate sale or rental properties. LoopNet's solution powers over 1000 websites used by over 1.2 million members. It contains over 2.8 billion square feet of lease listings and $300 billion in sale...
3. 

   Solution Highlights

   04/27/06 by Chris Pendleton | 2 Replies |

   Often I find developers asking questions about what kinds of applications have been built on Virtual Earth, other than the generally mashup oriented stuff on www.ViaVirtualEarth.com . Basically, what commercial reference implementations exist. So, I am going to start posting some to this blog to give you an idea of what is out there and inspiration for what can be built. I have a backlog of them, so stay tuned for a little storm of postings in that arena.
4. 

   Feedback on the "Commercial Control"

   04/17/06 by Chris Pendleton | 2 Replies |

   The folks over at Via Virtual Earth have started up a forum thread on the free-to-use, ad supported "commercial control", trying to get feedback on what you think microsoft should do different or the same as we prepare for future versions. If you have an opinion we would love to hear from you, so please chime in .
5. 

   What's in a name (change)?

   04/12/06 by Chris Pendleton | 0 Replies |

   As you may have noticed already, as I have gotten a few comments, URLs that used to lead to MapPoint Web Service information on www.microsoft.com now redirect to a site branded as Virtual Earth . What's up? Did we change the name of the MapPoint Web Service? Is this a new version? It is much more simple than that actually: We are combining our two primary services components, Virtual Earth Map Control and MapPoint Web Service, under a single brand, the Virtual Earth platform, for a number of reasons. The primary reason for doing this today is to more clearly show that they are complimentary components in a complete location service offering. Together they give you visualization tools for the...