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,...

As Santa heads north for his annual slumber and we’re all left with buyer’s remorse and daunting credit card bills we can now reflect on something positive: how Christmas was changed this year for the better with a 3D version of tracking Santa using Microsoft Virtual Earth . And, hey, I was stoked –...

Microsoft Virtual Earth and MSNBC are changing the game this year when it comes to tracking Santa. You’ve all seen the NORAD Santa Tracker and while that’s been fun over the years, well, it has gotten a bit stale. So, a few of us here in the Virtual Earth Product Group decided it was time to spice things...

I’ve had a couple inquiries about heat maps of late, so wanted to ensure people are aware of the capabilities enabled and resources available for creating heat maps with Virtual Earth. First off, my esteemed colleague Johannes Kebeck has just finished authoring a two part series on overlaying data atop...

Earthquake damage assessment just got a little easier. In the spirit of the close of the ESRI User Conference , I figured it was appropriate to post a little something about a GIS application using Microsoft Virtual Earth - enter Inlet (Internet-based Loss Estimation Tool) - okay, my post name is unoriginal...

There are certain areas of the world where Virtual Earth's imagery is, well, low resolution. Let's face it, the world is a huge place and Virtual Earth just having had it's 3rd birthday is only in the initial phases of rolling out imagery and photography to cover the world. For those of you who just...

The World Olympics kick off August 6 in Beijing, China with a football match. Inline with CCTV's interactive Microsoft Virtual Earth map-based application for Euro 2008 , today, The BBC News has published their BBC Sport's Olympic Map which uses Microsoft Virtual Earth for a back drop of tons of Olympic...

Being the Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform Evangelist, I'm all about getting the word out about Microsoft mapping products. There is a greater good in what I do, however and that is to get people using mapping. Something like 82% of all data in the world has a location component, so what better way to...

Our Microsoft Certified Partners SpatialPoint are at it again. They've published a new visualization tool for viewing radio broadcast signal coverage areas by station at FollowTheGame.com . The theme for the application is football, so you can stay tuned to the big game(s) while you're driving state...

The Virtual Earth version 6 API is now available. The launch included several new exciting features documented in the online SDK .Moving from Version 5 to Version 6 is easy! You simply need to change one character in your .ashx link - change http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=5...

It's official - MapCruncher is now a supported beta product by the Virtual Earth team! This is big. This means that MapCruncher has graduated out of Microsoft Research as a pet project with really cool implications to a fully supported application by our team. If you've never heard of MapCruncher I've...

Ortho Tile Sets and MapCruncher One of the new features that we shipped in the v3.1 release of the Virtual Earth Map Control is the support for adding ortho tile sets produced using tools like MapCruncher from MSResearch. Jaya, one of the developers who works on the API, has detailed this integration...

Last night, the most recent version of Live Local launched. Improvements include the ability to draw on top of the maps, highlighting favorite dog parks, cool bike trails, neighborhoods, etc.; white pages/people search, a great compliment to the business search functionality; some UI enhancements, like...

Microsoft Research has been working with Virtual Earth to develop a cool new application for overlaying information in the Map Control. Chris explains it better than I can: "The basic idea is that you can take any map in PDF format and overlay onto a Virtual Earth map. The benefit being that you can...