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Halloween is BY FAR my favorite holiday, so I find it only appropriate to publish a little something to help spread the holiday fear. A few years ago we published a Halloween Map (aka The Haunted Map), but we’re not doing it this year (and haven’t in 3 years). This year, I’m simply going to show you a very useful feature built into Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Live Toolbar that allows you to go to any haunted web site, select the address and view the haunted house in Bird’s Eye! The best and most up to date site I found is Haunted House Online powered by Haunt World . Now, going to either one of these sites will definitely put you in the mood to scare and be scared so check them out just...
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As promised during the Virtual Earth session Thursday at the PDC 2008 , we are making available all of the demos showed during the session. We've even included some BONUS content as well with demos that we did not get a chance to show at the PDC. Please note that these demos are released as is with no support. Also be sure to go get yourself a Virtual Earth Developer Evaluation Account when you begin to work with the Virtual Earth Web Service demos. Also, be sure to check out the Virtual Earth Web Services SDK on MSDN for more details on how to develop your applications. Here is a link to Mark Brown's SkyDrive for the samples. Go get them and start developing! CP
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There’s a new initiative at Microsoft to bring together different parts of the company under a single umbrella to prove the whole is greater than the sum of all it’s parts. The Public Sector initiative, dubbed “ The Single View Platform ” brings several different Microsoft products together to form a SUPER geographically-based, data visualization product suite. A single, geographic view of complex information and data sets across multiple roles, locations, and user interfaces can improve agency communication, collaboration, and decision-making to increase the success of essential initiatives. A solution that puts information in a single geographic context requires: Comprehensible visual presentation...
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The Microsoft Research Team has released an updated version of WorldWide Telescope for free download. The new release is jammed packed with features including my favorite, 3D Solar System and Universe View (plug in your X-Box controller prior to running WWT for fully immersive 3D tranquility). If there was ever a way to grasp how little we really are, this will certainly help put things in perspective. You thought flying around in Virtual Earth 3D was cool? Wait until you fly around the known universe in 3D. o Here's a list of the features: 3D Navigation from Earth, thru the Solar system, to the stars and out beyond the Milky Way, rendered in real time with lighting. This mode is just mind-blowing...
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Microsoft Virtual Earth will find you…. A week ago, The Microsoft Anti-Piracy Group launched Global Anti-Piracy Day (Oct. 21). Okay, I’m a week late AND, to be clear, this has nothing to do with Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19) - it is quite the antithesis, in fact. Seriously, though, the team works relentlessly to prevent software piracy which affects both software vendors (such as Microsoft) as it does consumers who buy pirated, thus unlicensed and unsupported, software thinking it’s legit. In their efforts to better illustrate the endeavors underway, The Anti-Piracy Team created the Global Anti-Piracy Day Interactive Map using Microsoft Virtual Earth . The map application highlights Anti...
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Using Pushpin objects in Microsoft Virtual Earth is pretty straightforward – you pass in latitude and longitude coordinates and drop a pushpin on the map; however, what if you want to move the pin to a new location while it’s already planted on a map? You could have this requirement for any multitude of reasons – correcting a inaccurate or interpolated geocode, ease of use for allowing users to move pins to correct the origin or destination of a route or moving a location to then regenerate spatial query analysis (demographic or other) based on the new location. Sweet, huh? Here’s a map with two pins. Now, let’s say you want to just click on the pushpin in Dallas and move it to Seattle. You simply...
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Well, the Bengals are once again the Bungles but that doesn’t mean the city can’t celebrate something else…how about their new launch of Microsoft Virtual Earth into Cincinnati.com ?!? That’s right, Cincinnati – a beautiful downtown city, I might add – has just added the ability to view all kinds of interesting data about Cinci with their CinciNavigator application . This site has tons of data to view about different aspects of the city ranging from news stories to gas prices to dog licenses! You see, Cinci gets it. There’s all of this data in the public domain that has a geographic context, so what better way to view it than on a map? Ok, so yes, I turned all of their data layers to illustrate...
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Microsoft Virtual Earth just crossed into another Live Search domain - Image Search . Live Image Search just added a Virtual Earth map to image results for certain major cities and landmarks. For points of interest such as Space Needle , Statue of Liberty or Pacific Beach , you'll get a Bird's Eye image of the respective location. If you don't see a Bird's Eye image and you're searching through a major city you still may have the opportunity to map out certain pictures in the result set that have been geospatially annotated and placed onto an overview map. If this is the case, you'll see normal image search results, but at the top of the result list is a link for "Show Map." You can...
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OMG. Double click to go full screen Now, THIS is how Microsoft Virtual Earth should be viewed! The Advanced Cognitive Engineering Lab at Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada, has officially forced me to strap on my helmet a little tighter, because they have just blown my mind - brain matter everywhere. I need to book a ticket to Ottawa to go stand in this thing and experience it first hand. CP
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The Live Search Maps China site just got some improvements. Innovation is burning like wildfire worldwide. Driving Direction – New! Country-wide (mainland China) road coverage Inter-city (e.g. Beijing to Shanghai ) and intra-city (e.g. Tiananmen to Bird's Nest in Beijing ) directions Multi-point directions (e.g. Tiananmen to Bird’s Nest to MS office ) New data pipeline for China driving data Transit Direction Improved performance by reducing engine average response time by 27% without quality degradation China is now the first VE market to ship both Driving and Transit Directions VE China API Enabled server side logging for VE China API . Upgraded China API to latest V6.2 Real-time...
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Virtual Earth will have a presence at PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, CA from October 27-30. We'll have a booth staffed by 2 of the guys who helped build the Virtual Earth platform (plus some marketing folks). They will also be at the ask the experts (un)session of the show. There's a Virtual Earth session for you to learn about our platform for building out your apps. Here's the abstract: Live Services: Deep Dive on Microsoft Virtual Earth Mark Brown Learn about the next major release of Virtual Earth. See the improvements to our parsing and geocoding engines, clustering, localization, and routing. Hear how the new Virtual Earth Web Services provide server-side support for building location-based applications...
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Argentina now has it's own Live Search Maps beta site. I'm a little late getting this on the blog, but better late than never. Plus, since I'm a little late to the game there's a good chance you didn't know about it either, so let's dig in. This site comes with geocoding places and addresses, road maps, satellite imagery and photography and traffic incident and flow information. In terms of content, this is what you get which is a great framework to build on. Also, I should point out, don't miss the right-click menu. Within the right-click menu you can add pushpins to the map which then fires off the whole Collections feature. Those of you who have used Live Search Maps in the US are well...
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I've been getting quite a few messages about this "400: Bad Request" error people are seeing when trying to reference the Virtual Earth Web Service, more specifically when trying to fetch tokens so it's worth posting a little something on how to fix it. Specifically, the error is, " There was an error downloading ' http://staging.common.virtualearth.net/find-30/common.asmx' . The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request. " The current documentation in the SDK shows a reference to https://staging.common.virtualearth.net/find-30/common.asmx ; however, users aren't getting the WSDL downloaded (I've had this problem myself). So, the solution is to change the reference...
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It's been almost a year since Microsoft acquired Multimap . We've been pretty quiet integrating them into Microsoft; however, it's time to make a little noise. As part of the first significant announcement the Multimap team has release a new free API which contains lots of robust features which you can leverage in your applications. And, if you're a licensed Virtual Earth customer you can gain access to the Multimap platform via your agreement. So, if you see something you like on the Multimap platform contact your Solution Specialist and get them crackin' to add it to your VE contract! So, what's the deal with the Multimap Free API? Here are the Marketing facts: We launched a new service for...
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Good morning, Chicago. It's time to check traffic with NBC (and Microsoft Virtual Earth )... Construction and incidents and cameras oh my! Plus, flow data, news, monetization and a clean interface. Now this is a traffic site! 3 years into AJAX map development and UI designers are really starting to get it. Clicking on any pushpin on the map will pop a small window in the lower right hand corner with additional information. For the cameras, you can see a small image with the ability to zoom in to a bigger picture of the roadway. What I REALLY like is the local component of high traffic road thumbnails. The site has dynamic locations where traffic is a concern at the moment! So, the 5 hottest traffic...
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