April 2008

 

Microsoft Partners With Institut Géographique National to Advance Digital Mapping in France

April 10, Microsoft Corp. and Institut Géographique National (IGN), a French leader in cartography and aerial imagery, announced a five-year partnership at Geo-événement 2008, a leading trade show for geo-information specialists in France. The partnership will allow Microsoft to license IGN's aerial imagery of France and make this available on the Virtual Earth platform and through Live Search Maps. Currently, Virtual Earth has high-resolution aerial imagery for nine major French cities and bird's-eye imagery for 43 towns and cities in France. The BD Ortho aerial imagery, available in May 2008, will build on the existing Virtual Earth platform by expanding aerial imagery to the entire French territory and allowing users to zoom and pan at a higher resolution than before. For more information, please read the press release.

 

 

Virtual Earth Imagery Used to Cut Down Solar System Costs

April 22, Californian solar installer Sungevity announced its new Web-based system for evaluating the solar potential for a given home through satellite data provided by Virtual Earth. Virtual Earth has the unique ability to provide data from different angles, allowing Sungevity to calculate a detailed engineering of the roof space. For most customers, the use of Virtual Earth means that Sungevity doesn't need to visit your home to provide you with a free quote, cutting the cost of a solar system by roughly 10 percent and cutting out 80 percent of on-site estimates, according to founder and president Danny Kelly. For more information, please visit the Virtual Earth for Government blog.

 

 

Microsoft Unveils Wind-Powered Virtual Earth 3-D Data Lab

April 17, Microsoft unveiled its new 100 percent wind-powered, container-based data lab in Boulder, Colo. The containers house data processing servers used in the processing of imagery and creation of the 3-D city models featured in the Virtual Earth mapping platform. Combined with the lab servers located in the facility's building, also wind-powered, the total storage capacity supporting the Virtual Earth operation in Boulder is 15 petabytes. Furthering Microsoft's commitment to environmental sustainability, the Boulder lab is purchasing wind-generated power by Renewable Choice Energy to power 100 percent of its operations. For more information, please visit Virtual Earth for Government blog or the feature on Denver Channel 9 News.

 

 

ViaMichelin Incorporates Virtual Earth Imagery

April 16, ViaMichelin, a leading provider of digital travel assistance services, and Microsoft announced an agreement to use Virtual Earth imagery in ViaMichelin's flagship services for European road users. The agreement will enable ViaMichelin's million European customers to benefit from Virtual Earth's high-resolution imagery following the launch of the new ViaMichelin Beta Web site on April 21. For more information, please visit ViaMichelin Beta.

 

 

Virtual Earth Helps Visualize France's Municipal Elections

In March 2008, Articque, a European leader in geographical analysis systems, worked with the Virtual Earth team to launch a Virtual Earth and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 application. The application allows French consumers to visualize the results of the second round of municipal elections in France. There are 36,801 towns and cities in France that have a mayor involved in the municipal elections. Virtual Earth is being used to identify which political party won the second round of municipal elections in each department. To see the application in action, please visit La France Electorale.

 

 

German Portal Allesklar.com AG Partners With Virtual Earth

Allesklar.com AG, a leading German provider of local information, and its portals, covers a comprehensive range of information focused on local and regional online searches. Beginning in May, several Allesklar.com AG portals will integrate Virtual Earth via the implementation of address search, routing and aerial views for 12,241 German cities. Meinestadt.de, Germany's largest cities portal, provides business addresses and Web site links, as well as local information for thousands of cities and municipalities. The ability of Virtual Earth to integrate with high-bandwidth content on Meinestadt.de offers new fields of application for the portal and enhances its value. Virtual Earth will be integrated across several leading portals including meinestadt.de, Allesklar, meineleute.de and DUKUDU.

 

 

Where 2.0 Conference

The Where 2.0 Conference will be held May 12—14 in Burlingame, Calif. The event is an opportunity for grassroots and leading-edge developers building location-aware technology to intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking location applications, platforms and hardware to gain a competitive edge. Vincent Tao, director of Microsoft Virtual Earth, will lead a session titled "Where is the 'Where,'" during which he will demonstrate the latest research and development at Virtual Earth. In addition, Tao will discuss his insights on how "where" is impacting the Web and people's lives. For more information, please visit Where is the "Where?".

 

 

Recent Updates

 

Microsoft Releases Virtual Earth Version 6.1

This month, Microsoft announced the release of Virtual Earth version 6.1, which features enhanced 3-D city models offering 10 times the number of buildings in each city that previous versions of Virtual Earth offered, 3-D trees, detailed terrain features, and more accurate building textures and coloring. The improved cities include Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas and Denver. The enhanced 3-D detail soon will roll out to more than 250 cities where 3-D models currently are available. The updated platform also features the ability to view imagery in bird's-eye hybrid view in many cities, allowing users to view street names laid over bird's-eye maps, providing better visual context and orientation. In addition to imagery updates, users now can get where they are going faster with added support to export Collections to Keyhole Markup Language (KML), GPX and GeoRSS, which you can load directly to portable navigation systems; traffic-based routing using Microsoft Research's ClearFlow technology to predict side-street traffic based on current traffic flows; and new walking directions to find the most direct route to walk to a destination, ignoring one-way streets, medians and other detours that pertain to motor vehicles. For more information and a full list of updates, please visit the Virtual Earth for Government blog or New Enhanced 3D City Models.