LiveSide - News blog : Live Maps

Live Maps Belgium launched…in French and Flemish!

Sunshine — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:12:19 GMT

After Live Search Maps for The Netherlands launched last month, their southern neighbor Belgium is now following with the release of their local Live Maps. And this is a special release at that. As you may know, in Belgium there are two main languages: Flemish (Belgian Dutch) and French. Therefore Live Maps Belgium launched in French (default) and Flemish.

For all you non-French, non-Flemish people out there who want to take a look: Chris Pendleton provides translations.

Virtual Earth Imagery Release, January 2009

Sunshine — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:50:00 GMT

A really really really HUGE Virtual Earth imagery release this month, 100TB 37TB! And guess what? Paris, France also got Bird’s eye photos now, yay!

Obliques (Bird’s Eye, International)

France – Paris, Nantes, St Quentin, Pau, Montauban, Lorient, Calais, Dunkerque, St. Nazaire, Quimper, Le Havre, Caen, Beauvais, Angers, Rennes
Germany – Berlin, Rhur Valley
Ireland – Dublin
Italy – Lamezia, Gela, Taranto, Rimini, Reggio di Calabria, Piacenza, Parma, Palermo, Monza, Lecce, Cosenza, Catania, L'Aquila, Bologna, Bari, Salerno
Netherlands – Purmerend, Amsterdam
Romania – Bucharest
Spain – Toledo, Tarragona, Lleida
Sweden - Malmo & Lund, Uppsala, Stockholm, Linkoping, Goteborg
United Kingdom – Preston, Portsmouth, Cheltenham & Gloucester, Caerphilly, Bournemouth, Hereford, Brighton & Worthing, Manchester, St. Albans

High Resolution Orthos (International)

Great Britain - England, Scotland
Greece – Thessaloniki
Japan - Oita, Kagoshima, Shizuoka, Sendai, Shuto
Norway - Vestfold, Harstad, Mjoseregionen, Tromso
Portugal – Lisbon
Spain - Madrid, Santiago, Guipizcoa, Coruna, Tarragona, Sevilla

Obliques (Bird’s Eye, United States)

Arizona - Pima County
California - Ventura County, Yolo County, Orange County, Butte County, Madera County, Tulare County
Colorado - Adams County
Delaware – Dover
Florida - Lake County, Collier County
Georgia - Bulloch County, Cobb County, Forsyth County
Idaho - Kootenai County
Illinois - La Salle County, Kankakee County, Winnebago County, Kendall County, Grundy County, Will County, Chicago, St. Clair County
Indiana – Anderson, Porter County, Tippecanoe County, Vigo County, Hendricks County, Huntington County, Hamilton County, Huntington County
Iowa – Rock Island County
Maryland - Frederick County, Charles County
Michigan - Livingston County, Allegan County, St. Clair County, Kent County, Eaton County, Bay County, Lenawee County
Minnesota - Steele County, St. Cloud, Huston County, Winono County, Dakota County, Scott County, Carver County, Hennepin County, Kandiyohi County, Anoka County
Missouri - Butler County, Franklin County, Andrew County, Pemiscot County, Jasper County, Jefferson County
New Jersey - Gloucester County
New York - Genesse County, Jefferson County, St. Lawrence County, Oneida County
North Carolina - Henderson County, Randolph County, Wayne County, Johnston County, Richmond County, Guidford County, Currituck County
Ohio - Geauga County
Pennsylvania - Cumberland County
South Carolina - Horry County,
Tennessee - Montgomery County
Texas - Williamson County, San Jacinto County, Collin County, Grayson County, Midland County, Parker County, Harris County, Wise County, Hays County
Virginia - Lynchburg County, Russell County, Chesterfield County, Suffolk County, Roanoke City County
Wisconsin - Rock County, Jefferson County, Winnebago County, Marathon County, Walworth County, Fond du Lac County

High Resolution Orthos (United States)

CA - Anaheim, Pasadena, East Los Angeles
FL - West Palm Beach, Orlando
CO – Arvada
MO - St. Louis
NJ – Trenton
NV – Henderson
TX – Mesquite, Garland, Arlington, Plano, Bellaire

This release also includes the first use of the Digital Globe satellite imagery Microsoft licensed a few months ago. Warning! Huge List!

...(read more)

Live Maps For Finland

Sunshine — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:40:04 GMT

Finland now also has Live Maps (Virtual Earth), including 3D and Bird’s Eye images.

More details, and a lesson in Finnish, can be found over at Chris Pendleton's.

Live Image Search Adds Virtual Earth

Sunshine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:59:31 GMT

If you search Images for major cities or landmarks on Live Search, you will now be able to see the results on a Virtual Earth Map. If available, like for the Space Needle, you will get a Bird’s Eye image:

As you can see on the above image you can also hover over any of the images for more information about that specific image, click on it and it will open the original image/site in a frame on the right. If you don’t see a Virtual Earth Map in the results of your search for a City, click on “Show Map”. You will then see the images that are geospatially annotated (or shall we say geo tagged/geotagged?) on a VE Overview Map.

Pretty, no? Don’t want to see a map there? Noticed how “Show Map” changed into “Hide Map”? Just click on it and it’s gone. More about VE in Live Search images can be found on Chris Pendleton's Virtual Earth Blog.

Unfortunately, just like the background images on Live Search, this is only so if you have Live Search set to en-us. So for your comfort I’ve included that in the links in this article. I sure hope to see this integrated in Live Search Images in all other markets too, not just the US! We were promised the backgrounds for more markets too, but we’ve yet to see that happen as well.

Virtual Earth, Live Maps update: Lots of new features, new SDKs, more

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:41:35 GMT

Virtual Earth 6.2, a big new update to Live Maps, and new access to a 3DVia content library where you can download, mash-up, and include 3D content on your 3D maps collections just went live. Lots to tell you about, and we’ll be going into more depth on Virtual Earth soon, but here’s some highlights. Thanks to Virtual Earth Evangelist Chris Pendleton for keeping us in the loop on this one.

We’ll hit the high points, but for more, check out Chris’s 3 blog posts:

New Feature Release of Live Search Maps!

New Version of Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D and 3DVia

Announcing the Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2

and for a good point by point feature list of what’s new in Virtual Earth 6.2, Mark Brown posted too:

Announcing: Virtual Earth 6.2 and Virtual Earth Web Services 1.0

Live Search Maps

Lots of new stuff in Live Search Maps, including:

Communities: Collections are indexed and available for search “seconds” after they are loaded. In addition, Collections data is used where no Business listings are available for business searches

Local search: Improvements include filters refine searches based on what you are searching for (hotels, for example)

Details page: Moved from a tabbed model to inline, allowing for much more content:

Multi-Point directions: Enables you to generate a single set of directions for reaching multiple destinations

Landmark hints: Hints will show up in driving directions in North America, telling you to “turn at the Taco Bell”

Weather: in 3D real time weather, based on 14 cloud types, updated every 3 hours, will be available

Virtual Earth 3D and 3DVia

Go to Live Search Maps and click on 3D, and you’ll be prompted to update to a new version. At the same time, you can update the 3DVia bits (from Chris’s blog):

As for Dassault, well, they've just opened up their 3D model inventory hosted in 3DVia.com's 3D online content library as a part of a program called "remix" which is effectively a 3D mashup creator with Virtual Earth. You now have access to thousands of models hosted on 3DVia.com that can be "remixed" in 3DVia and hosted on Live Search Maps for rendering in your Virtual Earth application. Whoa. Additionally, they've updated the UI and navigation to be more user friendly (thank you!) and released video tutorials illustrating among other things how to build a house in less than 5 minutes.

Virtual Earth 6.2 and Virtual Earth Web Services 1.0

We’ll be going into more depth on Virtual Earth here on LiveSide soon, but both the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK and the Virtual Earth AJAX Control SDK on MSDN have been significantly updated. Check the posts from Chris and Mark for more, and check out their webcasts (from both Chris and Mark), coming up later in the week.

Live Search adds features as market share shrinks

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:01:34 GMT

More of the same from comScore this week, as the latest numbers show that in the US, Live Search and Yahoo! continue to lose share to Google. While US search share numbers from the three major reporting services (comScore, Neilsen Online, and Hitwise) do not always agree, they usually aren’t that far off from each other either. In the comScore version, while the number of searches in August remained about the same as the number for July, Google gained, and both Microsoft and Yahoo! lost (interestingly, Ask and AOL gained as well).

In the meantime, however, Live Search continues to press on. Live Search Maps continues to keep adding imagery, a stand alone Live Map of India similar to standalone maps of China and Taiwan, and the technology acquired with the recent purchase of Powerset is already starting to show up in Live Search, in the form of better Wikipedia captions, improved Instant Answers, and better lists of related searches.

Google Maps: We’re not evil, just not very good

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:32:00 GMT

Apparently there’s been a bit of a stir around what Google Maps did/didn’t do to their maps of the country of Georgia. In a blog post today, Google says they haven’t done anything to their maps in relation to the conflict currently affecting Georgia, that they’ve just never had any good information on the country to begin with:

Some of our customers have asked if we removed map data from any of these countries in response to the recent hostilities in that region and I can assure you that is not the case. Data for these countries were never on Google Maps in the first place.

Here’s what you get today from Google Maps:

Of course if you wanted information on Georgia, or South Ossetia, you could try Live Search Maps:

And then, in an unrelated but kind of funny aside, one of my favorite blogs PhotoShop Disasters posted what appears to be (poor) photoshopping of a Google Map of a part of the Netherlands, near Brummen:

(note the repetition of the white tree, etc)

Live Search Maps has a nicer picture (of course):

We doubt the black helicopter assertion, as the patch of trees is next to a golf course, and we’re not saying that any and all map offerings probably aren't fixed up somewhere along the line, just funny that PhotoShop Disasters picked up on it.

Google Maps Street View “drive-bys” Microsoft and Live Maps

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:30:26 GMT

A Google Maps Street View car was spotted on the Microsoft campus the other day, according to a post over on Gizmodo. Apparently the “GooCar”, as Gizmodo calls it, got a little too close to Building 116, where Live Maps resides:

the Google guys were driving around the team that does Windows Live Maps, like nothing was wrong, when other Microsoft guys were laughing and yelling at them. Much nerd hilarity ensued.

Click through to Gizmodo for a picture of the GooCar (dang, no harassment in evidence).

Google Maps is expanding its Street View offering, in spite of some privacy concerns. Live Maps had at one time tested a similar service, but although the site remains up, it hasn’t been expanded. Whether or not that is because of privacy concerns, or just an emphasis on Birds Eye, which Google does not offer, or some other reason isn’t clear.

Don’t like the 20TB of new data in Virtual Earth? Submit your own!

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:11:14 GMT

Another big data update over at Virtual Earth, over 20 TB, including Microsoft UltraCam images of Iowa City in drier times:

(a more recent picture from the Des Moines Register, below)…

…and other non-Ultra-cam imagery of lots of areas of France, some parts of Scotland and Wales, and Beijing, among others:

Also just introduced is a new program, GoVE:

We're just starting a new program called "GoVE" which enables municipalities, state and local governments, aerial photographers, carrier pigeons, whoever, to share your imagery with Microsoft for publishing onto Virtual Earth the platform that powers thousands of enterprise applications, not to mention our own Live Search Maps.

Now your imagery can be part of the Virtual Earth we're creating. Join in the world changing event that is Microsoft Virtual Earth.

…

GoVE supports the data sharing goals of many public sector organizations by providing a free publishing service. Through GoVE, your taxpayer-funded information will be provided on a free, open access web site that benefits taxpayers, government officials, your corporate tax base, state and local governments, etc.

Things like tourism, transportation, utilities, energy, emergency preparedness, natural resources management, and economic development can be assisted through the broad scale distribution of public data.

More on Chris Pendleton’s Virtual Earth blog

Live Maps gets a new header and other Live Search news

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:59:59 GMT

Thanks to LiveSide member derviskemal for noticing that the Live Maps header has changed. Here’s the new look:

…and what we were seeing up until a few days ago:

Much more in keeping with the overall new look of Live Search. We wrote earlier about inconsistencies across Live Search properties, glad to see at least one of them is being fixed.

In another Live Search related story, Danny Sullivan had an interesting breakdown of the latest Compete numbers on search share in the US. While the overall numbers told the same old story, Compete took a new approach this month to Live Search Club.

Rather than either including the Live Search Club numbers along with Live Search (which skewed the search share numbers unfairly, some thought), or dropping them out entirely, which is what has been happening, this time Compete separated out Live Search Club but included it in the results as a separate category:

While the main purpose of Live Search Club is to play games and win prizes, and not search, it’s interesting to note that Live Search Club beats AOL search, and is nearly on par with Ask.com. Maybe there’s something to this Live Search Club business after all.

Live Search for Windows Mobile gets update

Chris — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:33:55 GMT

Live Search for Windows Mobile has just received an update, bringing out the features announced at CTIA last month. While it provides the standard mapping and local search that we’ve come to expect, it now adds the following:

· Map a contact: For any people in your contacts list/address book, immediately view their address on a map and get directions there.

· View Virtual Earth collections: View custom maps of locations and events that are created on the PC by you, your friends, or the broader community.

· Web search: Launch web search directly from the client to find web pages, product price comparisons and reviews, news, images, and more.

· Weather: View the latest weather conditions and the 4 day forecast

In addition, UK users now get access to the Directions feature previously restricted to US users only. The collections feature is particularly cool, and Kip has a video of this that’ll be up shortly.

Check out the update at http://wls.live.com

Changes Afoot For UK Live Maps Users – A Heads Up

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:58:00 GMT

James Senior, a Microsoft UK blogger, has put up on his blog about an impending change to Live Maps in the UK. Don’t worry, we’re not going to see the farce that happened last time! The changes that will be coming are as follows:

If you visit the URL http://maps.live.com you will get to Live Maps UK.
If you go to maps via http://www.live.com then you will get to Multimap.
If you go to maps via http://www.msn.co.uk then you will get to Multimap.

So at least now if you go to maps.live.com you’ll actually be going to the site you wanted to go to in the first place. James also posts the official statement for this move:

We recently announced the integration of Multimap into Live Search in the UK and will start to route users directly to the Multimap service from MSN UK and Live.com from 9^th May.

This release is part of our longer term consumer strategy to have one mapping and local search site in the UK, integrating the best of both Multimap and Virtual Earth (Live Search Maps) technologies. The management and development teams of Microsoft and Multimap are working collaboratively, with a common vision bringing localised products to market faster. Given that Multimap resonates successfully with UK consumers serving over 45% of the UK mapping audience, building on this brand is the right strategic direction.

We recognise, however, that we must continue to offer users a choice of services while we complete the integration of all Virtual Earth features into the Multimap site. We are therefore maintaining the Live Search Maps UK site and users can still access this at http://maps.live.com to use favourite features such as Windows Live Collections and 3D maps. Powerful VE Aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery has been integrated into the Multimap site to give consumers the broadest array of map styles on the market today.

Additionally, we are going to provide prominent signposting to Live Search Maps UK from the Multimap site for those who are redirected there. All Live Search and MSN UK mapping traffic through ‘Maps’ links will be redirected to www.multimap.com but any shared Collections links will not.

Developers and businesses that have invested in the Virtual Earth technology are unaffected by the redirection of our Live Search Maps and MSN mapping traffic to Multimap. We will continue to support both technology platforms and expect to offer an expanded set of opportunities and features over time.

We thank our users for the feedback and passion they have shared so far as we continue to evolve our local and mapping sites in the UK. We encourage you to try out these sites for yourselves.

So when is this all taking place? James states that this will be switching over on 9th May.

Live Search Maps with Steve Lombardi

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:06:14 GMT

In this installment of our discussion with Steve Lombardi from Live Search Maps, Steve talks a little about street labels in Bird’s Eye Imagery, and shows us around Tours in 3D, how to add them to your collections, and how to create a movie from a 3D Tour, recording it in High Definition.

Live Maps with Steve Lombardi Birds Eye Labels and 3D Tours - MSN Video

Virtual Earth / Live Maps: It's Music Festival Time!

Sunshine — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:24:42 GMT

Looking for a Music Festival to go to this summer? The Virtual Earth Team has created a map that will eventually contain nearly a hundred festivals around the world!

Spin's May issue runs down nearly a hundred festivals around the world featuring a dozen major events and hundreds of performers and inspired me to start a Collection to help you find featured Festivals this Summer.

Not everything is on it yet, but if you wish to be kept up to date on new additions you can subscribe to the Collection's RSS feed.

Full article: Virtual Earth / Live Maps: It's Music Festival Time!

Live Maps part 2: Export Collections to Nav device

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:55:00 GMT

In part one of this little series on new features of Live Maps, Steve Lombardi, a Live Maps program manager, showed us around Live Maps Collections, and MapCruncher. In the second part, we’ll talk about exporting a Live Maps Collection to a file that can be imported into your Nav device.

First a little more on process. After posting our first video, I got a nice note from Michael Palermiti from Windows Live reminding me that I could upload videos from the Gallery, and it would take care of compression. This video was small enough (<100mb) that it didn’t need compressing, but using Windows Live Photo Gallery definitely saves some steps (although the processing time is still the same, it takes a long time to process the videos once they’re up on Soapbox, a half hour or more). Here’s how you do it:

Open Windows Live Photo Gallery and select your video (you may have add the location)
Click on Publish to MSN Soapbox (you need to be signed in to the correct Windows Live ID in Photo Gallery):
Upload the video

Uploading of course depends on your internet connection, etc. Here on Comcast cable, it takes a bit (upload speeds are much slower than download). Then it takes a while for Soapbox to “process” the video.

OK on to the video. Thanks for the feedback on showing who we’re talking to, I was concentrating on getting a usable “screencast”. We’ll do it next time. I did take a photo of Steve, with the Xacti video cam (basically it’s two buttons: record video, or shoot a still pic, very simple). The camera comes equipped with a hella flash, which might explain Steve’s somewhat startled look:

Live Maps Export to Nav Device - MSN Video

Steve just posted a tutorial on how to export Collections to files, on his Live Maps / Virtual Earth blog. The examples aren’t exactly the same, but you can follow along.

Next, we’ll take a look at making a Live Maps 3D Tour, and labels for Birds Eye imagery. Oh, and yes there’s still one more to come after that, and no I can’t tell you what it is, yet ;)