LiveSide - News blog : Live Search Maps

Virtual Earth API, 3D updates

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:09:14 GMT

Last fall Virtual Earth released version 6.2 of their API, including the Virtual Earth AJAX control, and late yesterday it has been updated, according to a blog post on Chris Pendleton’s Virtual Earth Evangelist’s blog.

Today we released updates to the Microsoft Virtual Earth AJAX control and a new version of the Virtual Earth 3D map control. We’ve added a couple new methods for adding and removing pins (and DIVs) in the AJAX control; added performance improvements for AJAX and 3D; enhanced geocoding and parsing across the board (AJAX and Virtual Earth Web Service) and fixed a few bugs in the AJAX and 3D controls. There are lots of architectural changes behind the scenes that you won’t appreciate unless you’re inside Microsoft, so I will spare you the details of those. Now, that being said, for the AJAX map control we just upgraded Version 6.2, so you already have access to the new features and can start using them today without changing your link to Virtual Earth. Everyone is on 6.2 because we’ve either auto-upgraded you or you made the switch yourself. The Virtual Earth 3D control will require an update! Download the latest bits by going to your favorite Virtual Earth-powered web site (such as Live Search Maps) and click 3D and you will be prompted to install the latest bits.

For those of you (like me) who have been bouncing around between Windows 7 installs and haven’t gotten back to Live Search Maps in 3D, it’s well worth a second look. The install was quick and simple (like Chris says, just click on 3D on a Live Search Map and you’ll be taken through the install, just takes a few minutes). If you already have 3D installed, you’ll be prompted to upgrade.

(afraid this view of Seattle might be a little TOO realistic – we can’t even catch the sun in Virtual Earth!)

The updates include increased performance by compression to the 1.4 million buildings rendered in 3D (!!), addition of anistropic filtering to reduce blur and preserve detail at extreme viewing angles, the addition of a stylized Celestial Sky, and lots of goodies for developers. Much more on Chris’s blog, with links to even more detail, check it out.

Live Search Maps for The Netherlands launched

Sunshine — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:04:24 GMT

After Finland got it's Live Search Maps, we now also have Live Search Maps in The Netherlands (my Location).

This release includes 3D, Collections, Directions (drive and walk) and 43 cities (Amsterdam isn’t amongst those strangely enough) in Birds-Eye view!

[De Dom – Utrecht]

The business search is powered by De Telefoongids. As with the Finnish release, Chris Pendleton provides translations (Dutch – English, hmm he could have asked me….).

Live Search Video, Images updated: featuring TV Show search, Bird’s Eye

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:21:07 GMT

Even though we’re not at PubCon, we’re loving Twitter Search, as it’s bringing us some great tidbits from the Live Search announcements from Satya Nadella’s keynote. A number of new features are being rolled out, including the addition of TV shows added to Live Search Video, and Bird’s Eye imagery included in image searches:

The Live Search Video home page features TV shows from MSN Video on Hulu:

Images has also received an update: the demo at Pubcon included a search for the Las Vegas Hotel “Bellagio”:

Check out the great keynote writeup from Search Engine RoundTable, which I found, of course, on Twitter

Photosynth comes to Live Search Maps

damaster — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:46:23 GMT

We mentioned previously that the Photosynth team has officially moved into the Virtual Earth Product Group. Today, Sarah Perez on Channel 10 pointed out that Photosynth is now officially integrated with Live Search Maps. Here’s an excerpt:

As you navigate in a map or zoom in or out in a particular location in Live Maps, you can choose to display pushpins for each Photosynth available in that area. You then just click the “launch Photosynth viewer” link to dive in and start exploring those synths.

You can try this now in Seattle, in Cairo at the Sphinx, in Vatican city, or at the Leaning tower of Pisa, for example.

Here are the steps that allow you to find this feature in Live Search Maps, we’ll use the Leaning Tower of Pisa as an example here:

Go to Live Search Maps and navigate to any location where synths may be available, try “Paris”
Go to Collections > Explore collections to turn on Explore mode and view all user-generated content on Live Search Maps.
On the left pane, click on the Photosynth button to filter out to display just synths, as shown below:
You should find a list of the synths available at the location, with the corresponding numbers displayed on the Virtual Earth map. Click on Click to Launch Photosynth Viewer to open the synth.
Enjoy!

Announcing Live Search Maps India

Sunshine — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:31:07 GMT

India has a new Live Search Maps site! Features are:

Street Maps for 9 important Indian cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur and National Road Network of India with roughly 20,000 cities/towns/major localities (as points on the map). Political Map of India with important geographical features that includes national roads connecting around 20,000 Indian cities are on the offer. Highlight is the detailed maps for 9 important Indian cities as mentioned earlier. Within these 9 cities, important places likes monuments, restaurants, hotels are also presented as icons in the maps. Maps of supported cities has been stitched with the national road visually and navigationally.

Location Search – Global (one need not type the city name), context-aware (i.e. ranking of results considers the map view), error-tolerant (corrects the typos, expands the important abbreviations) and flexible solution to find complete or partial address, roads, localities, landmarks and places of general interest.

Business Listing (Yellow Pages) Search - This allows us to find businesses listed with us. Click Business tab and specify what (e.g. “Petrol Pump” in first box) and where (e.g. “Indira Nagar” in second box) to get the business listings sorted according to distance from the location of search (i.e. Indira Nagar, Bangalore).

Routing/Driving Directions

Intra-city visual driving directions

Intercity integrated routing (detailed driving directions inside the cities having Street Maps and normal driving directions on the National map)

One-click driving directions

Under this, one can route from a given source to a destination. Source and destination can be specified in multiple ways – by right clicking on the map, or by hovering over the search result icon displayed on the map or by hovering over the pushpins in the collections or by clicking directions link from menu and typing in the required addresses/locality/places/road. Source and destination can be any city/locality/place/landmark in India within 15KM of distance from any road. Clicking Reverse link at the bottom will swap the start and end point and will compute the route. Selecting Shortest Distance radio button will compute the routes for the shortest distance between the two points.

Share - User can share (by selecting “Send in e-mail” from “Share” Menu) his various search results, driving directions, collections etc. over email.

Print - User can take print out of the maps, driving directions, search results.

Collections - One can create collections of pushpins, custom drawings on the maps, routing etc. and save it against a Windows Live ID for viewing later or sharing it with others.

For full details and more images head over to Chris Pendleton’s VE blog: Announcing Live Search Maps India

Live Search Maps Goes Live In Taiwan

Sunshine — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:00:08 GMT

Now Taiwan can also enjoy Live Search Maps (as Live Pages).

Microsoft Taiwan and Chunghwa Telecom realized this together making use of technologies from:

Chunghwa Yellow Page - geocoding engine, Business Listings and Point of Interest information
Kingway Technology - road map images
Multimap - mapping API to render road maps from Kingway and aerial maps from Virtual Earth

Additionally a number of services were provided with this release, including: Local Search, Maps (Road and Aerial), CHT powered web call for their premium subscribers, a Messenger Activity and a Messenger Tab. Chris Pendleton has the full story and more screenshots.

Live Search Maps Improves Internationally

Sunshine — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:56:00 GMT

More news on Live Search and Virtual Earth. Live Search Maps China has expanded and improved it’s site with:

Real-time Traffic in Beijing
Send-to-Mobile for free for local search and transit routing result
Transit data refresh for existing 11 cities including 3 new subway in Beijing (No.10, Airport and Olympic).
Expanded coverage from 11 to 31 cities.
Geocoding and Local Search
Data refresh for existing 114 cities including Olympic Venues.
Support city and county name geocoding for areas outside of 114-city coverage.
Olympic query relevance improvement
Local search category refinement
Map refresh for 10 existing major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc.
Expanded tile coverage for 30 more cities, totally 289 cities now.

Very nice, if you want to keep up with traffic etc. during the upcoming Olympics. But that’s not all! Live Search Maps Australia just got launched and includes data from Virtual Earth, NineMSN and Yellow (Pages). Australia must have liked the Bird's Eye Imagery that was added in April's Update.

Tip from Chris Pendleton:

If you get redirected to Live Search Maps (US) you can access the Australian site via Ninemsn.com.au, click "maps" above the search box and search for an Australian city or place.

Source: Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog : Live Search Maps Improves Internationally

The All-New www.backofmyhand.com

Darren Straight — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 04:41:00 GMT

Introducing an exciting new site called enabling you to become a local … anywhere. You can use this new site as a place for all the collections you’ve created on Windows Live Search Maps - collected together in a single online tourist guide.

BackOfMyHand allows you to share your knowledge of your hometown, places you’ve visited, or find information on places you’re planning to visit. With this new site, you’ll no longer have to search through loads of spam sites just to find out what you should and shouldn’t do on your holidays in the UK. So you can be prepared before you even get there.

To check out this cool new addition to the Live.com family, visit http://www.backofmyhand.com/