The Imagine Cup 2009 finals is in full swing. On July 3, 2009 in Cairo the winner will be announced for the most innovative project. The Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition, Imagine Cup is one way Microsoft is encouraging young people to apply their imagination, their passion, and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world – today. Now in its seventh year, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a global event. In 2008, more than 200,000 students from 100 countries entered the Imagine Cup competition. The Croatian Team consisting of Tomislav Fotak, Ivan Lozić, Marko Škvorc, Ivan Švogor integrated Deep Earth...
One feature of the Bing Maps APIs that has gained a lot of traction is the ability to overlay custom tiles atop the Bing Maps tiles to illustrate tons of data in a raster format. The ability to draw data on the map using vector graphics is all fine and dandy, but when you want to render census data, weather illustrations or even historic maps of what an area used to look like, well, browser-supported drawing techniques would pretty much crap out. So, what you’ll do is render that information prior to putting in on the map (using the Tile Pyramid Schema or Map Cruncher ) and overlay it onto the map (using map.AddTileLayer() in AJAX; or, MapTileLayer.TileSource.Add(tileSource) in Silverlight...
BBC has been quite the busy bees publishing some innovative applications on Bing Maps . Check out this list of applications: Save Our Sounds – BBC wants you to help build an interactive map of the world. So get involved and send in recordings of sounds from where you live. Listen to the sounds of the world - and then send us your audio. Cannes 2009 Map - Use this map to explore 2009's Cannes Film Festival in video, audio, pictures and text. Updates will appear on this map throughout the festival, which began on 13 May. Our entertainment reporter Victoria Lindrea will be sending reports by email and Twitter from Cannes, and you can also read extracts from Arts Correspondent Razia Iqbal's...
A dear friend of mine just moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia (dontcha know). Luckily, she’ll be able to find some good pizza to keep her warm through those freezing winters. And, she can do so using Bing Maps and Boston Pizza’s restaurant locator . Just enter a city and province and click “Go.” An auto-complete script is in place while you type your city – I love being lazy. Alternatively, you can enter a postal code and radius – 10, 25 or 50 KM. Note the custom numbering pushpins, Boston Pizza logo in the popup, contact information and links to driving directions and a fully detailed restaurant page complete with a menu, restaurant hours and even an RSS feed of...
Gur Kimchi (Bing Maps infrastructure Architect and Development Manager) sat down in an episode of Expert to Expert on Channel 9 to discuss the evolution of Bing Maps (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth). The interview goes pretty deep in discussing how the original Virtual Earth was built based on a Bill Gates approved Think Week Paper and a production-based prototype was done in 100 days; the comparison to Google's investment in maps and data centers versus Microsoft's and how Bing Maps was architectured from the onset to scale to a massive proportion. Worth the hour of your time required to understand Bing Maps from the inside-out. Short: Erik Meijer and I paid a visit to Bing Maps infrastructure...
My hotel customers may grit their teeth when they read this; however, while I have memberships at almost every hotel I am partial to Starwood Hotels . Ok, there, I said it. I do stay at all the others because I’m side by side with my licensing guys and they have their preferences; but, my lonely nights on the road are spent in a Starwood Hotels. Mostly because of the W Hotels brand. Pimp. Well, Starwood just launched 11 of their web sites using Bing Maps for Enterprise and the sites are as pimped out as I feel when I stay at one of their W Hotels. When searching for hotels from their home page, just enter a city, state and or country name plus optionally dates and you’ll be sent to...
Eddie Bauer is the latest brand to refresh their web site look by using Bing Maps for Enterprise . Directly from their home page, you can put in a postal code and get a map of the stores with a 50 mile radius of that postal code. You’ll notice a few customized touches when it comes to the results: Custom pushpins to pinpoint the locations on the map. Custom colors per pin type – green meaning retail location; orange meaning an outlet. A popup for each location providing the store type, store name, address, phone number and lat/lon (in case you’re hiking there and using your GPS to get there). A list below the map with store location information including hours (VERY HELPFUL...
May’s imagery update comes with a shiny, new toy to play with (in addition to the 248,000+ sq. kilometers of new imagery). We’ve decided that instead of providing you with some ginormous list of locations and a few snapshots, we’ll provide you with an experience. Check out the new Bing Maps World Tour (hosted on Windows Azure. no less). The Bing Maps World Tour is a rich new way of viewing our imagery updates every month by navigating the respective pins or just watching the slide show take you around the world to explore the new imagery. I’ve provided a detailed description of the application’s features below so you can fully appreciate the experience of exploring...
As you may or may not know, I'm coming down under next week to present at REMIX and I'm super excited! However, I don't just show up for REMIX and party...although, I do enjoy that aspect of the MIX circuit. In coordination with my local Bing Maps Solution Specialist Peter Ulm, I'm doing a customer and partner road show. We're hitting Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney next week. And, hey, John O'Brien from Soul Solutions will be with us for the Brisbane and Sydney legs of the trip. Should be fun and educational, plus we can talk face to face about Bing Maps. Registration information below. The Microsoft mapping team are holding a series of presentations in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney this June...
Not the case. Well, Bing Maps is pretty much the same, but we did get the new logo and image captions of what's on Bing.com's home page. Oh, and the URL is now bing.com/maps ; however, more importantly, there are other Bing properties that are implementing Bing Maps in a variety of ways. A search for Rubio's near San Diego, CA provides the 10 closest locations with a nice little inset map pinpointing where they are. In fact, if you just search for San Diego, you can use the list of topics down the left-hand side to continue to narrow in on the information you need for San Diego - Attractions, Weather, Map, Hotels, Events, or Images. Clicking "Map" link will provide you with a small overview map...
I’m moving on.... No, not from Microsoft or even Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth), but from MSDN. My blog is moving to the new Bing Community site . In fact, if you’re reading this you’re getting the entry from the new site, so “Hello, World!” Yeah, I’m the only person that can say it and mean it! Now, what to call my readers since we changed to Bing? I used to refer to you as “Virtual Earthlings,” so maybe “Bingalings” or “Bing Bongs?” “Earthbings?” Oye, this will take some marinating. The new communities site will aggregate all of the greatest Bing Bloggers around Microsoft into a single portal. Now, my old...
