Its been a month of March madness for VE imagery crew- The 40+ TB publish of Virtual Earth Maps brings Birds Eye coverage to a lot of new regions, some nice High res ortho imagery, and a couple of hidden surprises that will be turned on in a couple of weeks. The state of Mississippi benefits most with over 40 counties of the richest aerial imagery on the net, while Ireland gets a boost with a bunch of new cities including Cork and Limerick. Check out the full list here. 

Marriott is rolling out touch screen kiosks in their Courtyard hotels in the coming months. The interactive vertical mount screens feature local weather, travel information, maps, directions, and Business Listing information. Check out this video on their site to see one in use. Chris has some more details and screenshots on his blog.

Via PlanetGeo I came upon a couple of early stage demos today worth  a moment of your time if you're a developer interested in some near future technologies that will have big impact on the geospatial industry.

First is from Dave Bouwman whose blog on .NET GIS development has been at the top of my feed pile the last few months. This proof of concept application queries SQL 2008 for points along a route that are keyed to streetside images. 

Next up is a pretty neat experiment with Silverlight 2.0's Deep Zoom feature on the GIS in XML blog. Deep zoom is a technology from Live labs based on Seadragon that you may have seen demo'd at last year's TED Conference. [if you haven't seen this, i total recommend you stop right here and invest 3 minutes!! its amazing.] What you will see in Randy's Silverlight application is a 144 megapixel image with completely fluid navigation thanks to Deep Zoom. Also of interest in his post is the story and steps to piece the image together from Terraserver's  USGS Urban Area imagery.

Don't take the title too seriously; I haven't run off to trademark it (too late) or set up a series of conferences, but I do see some new technologies coming together with some old favorites to deliver a platform for web mapping and GIS like we haven't seen in the past. Recent news about SQL 2008 Spatial, Silverlight 2.0, MapDotNet, and the VE server got me thinking about what it would take to glue together the next generation of GIS with a focus on the web; not just simple web apps to view maps that are abundant today, but true GIS 1.0 functionality brought to the web at web scale. Here's a list of some technologies I'd be looking at if I was planning to build such a system.

ArcINFO. Hey wait, that's GIS 0.1. Yup, and its still the undisputed king of map creation; you're probably gonna be relying on the Arc family when GIS 8.0 comes around as well, so get used to it. In GIS 3.0 a lot more will become possible in terms of real map creation in a web browser, but i don't see the world completely getting away from heavy clients for map making and distilling data into shapes anytime soon.

SQL Server 2008. SQL Server's market leading growth, especially in small and mid sized orgs, is pretty impressive and gives the spatial features of the 2008 release a great installed base to ride on. And choosing to include Spatial in each edition of SQL from Enterprise to Express will prove to be key in jumpstarting GIS 3.0. Many organizations running 2005 that never touched mapping in a serious way will find they suddenly have the nucleus of the killer enterprise spatial platform after upgrading. that's a huge adoption barrier obliterated.  

Safe FME - The Swiss army knife of spatial data transformation handles hundreds of popular and unpopular data formats and is the perfect companion for your new SQL 2008 setup.

Virtual Earth Enterprise server. many businesses choose not to integrate web services in their applications including those GIS based. Reasons range from data privacy and policy restrictions to performance issues. The VE Server or appliance allows these orgs to access all of the unique capabilities of VE through its familiar API's while never sending traffic off their net for map fetching. This isn't a necessary component of GIS3.0, but for many organizations this addresses another major non-starter.

MapCruncher. One of the most empowering tools in our industry, Cruncher makes it easy for anyone to add their raster layers to mapping applications. from custom flown aerial imagery to hand drawn community planning maps, Cruncher helps you register your raster maps and then kicks out a directory of tiles ready for use in Virtual Earth.

MapDotNet Server. Spatial middleware that makes it easy to work with geographic data from a variety of sources in your web applications. MDN is complete with Visual Studio plugins, support for SQL Spatial, and out of the box web and desktop clients. if they deliver on their rumored Silverlight 2.0 support, MDN becomes the obvious choice as a pillar of your GIS 3.0 platform.

Silverlight 2.0. It's unfortunate to see SL always framed as "its like flash, but different" in reviews. lazy tech reporters ;-) i think that misses the point of what will prove to be revolutionary about SL - its all about the developers. Yes, the promise of SL 2.0 to deliver application interfaces in the browser as powerful as we are all used to on pc's is sexy and deserves the attention it gets in tech media. But ultimately providing developers with the ability to design, build, and debug with a class of familiar tools and languages is what has been missing.

FastCompany.tv has launched and the World Wide Telescope is featured in one of their first episodes. Robert Scoble gets a first hand tour of WWT from co-creators Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay who have more time to go into far more detail than the 6 minute presentation from TED conference last week including lots of background on the history of the project and a very cool tutorial and product tour. If you have an interest in WWT and can't wait until Spring to try it yourself, this is a very fun preview. The tour feature is killer.

Click image to launch video

Over the weekend I saw this impressive Collection of Sundials featured on The Google Earth Blog. After checking out a few I wondered how many of these locations would be covered by Virtual Earth's Birds eye imagery? Since the Collection of Sundials was represented as a KML file, it was pretty easy to view it at Live Maps - just point to it with the 'mapurl=' parameter like this:

http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=887103

Once loaded it was really easy to cruise around to explore each sundial in Birds Eye view. Birds Eye's four distinct looks at each point on earth are great aid in virtual site seeing, especially in this case where many of the subjects range from 15 to 30 feet in diameter. I found that about 80% of the sundials were visible in the low elevation Birds Eye view, including many of the European sites.

SunDial bridge in Redding, CA as seen from the East

Reggio nell'Emilia, Italy

Frank's post on the GE Blog features some other KML Collections that are fun to look at in Live Maps. The easiest way to do so is to right click on each link and copy the shortcut, then paste it on the mapurl parameter as I showed above. The October 07 release of Live Maps was the first to support KML viewing and import to Collections - we're working on an update to this feature area that should make the KML viewing experience even better. We want to keep it light and simple design-wise, while adding support for some of the less used capabilities of KML that we didn't hit in v1. As always, suggestions are welcome and you can email them to me at stevelom at microsoft d com

Some Favorites housekeeping this weekend. I've added a folder for SQL 2008 since there's now more than 1 link :-) , added some dev blogs, and updated some links that have changed (like Arnaud's primarily French blog) If you aren't seeing the Favorites Folders in the right sidebar you are probably on a specific article page or via RSS - the Faves are on the homepage. If you know of a blog or webpage that should be added email it to me at stevelom a t microsoft dot com.