I've been emailing Michal Migurski and Tom Carden of Stamen over the past couple months, looking at an early prototype of what has grown into Trulia Hindsight -

Trulia Hindsight, a new site that we’ve developed with design firm Stamen, provides an animated map of residential properties in the US. With Trulia Hindsight, you can search for specific cities, neighborhoods, or even streets and then watch as properties appear on the map in the year they were built. A slider control allows you to see when the majority of development occurred, pause on a specific time frame or focus on only homes built before or after specific years. Truly a unique and fun way to visualize the development of cities, towns or blocks . . . be careful you may spend hours cruising around the country.

As a prototype it was an interesting bit of eye candy, and now as an integral part of of Trulia's website it has become as useful as it is beautiful. Stamen leveraged their Modest Maps Library and experience with online mapping to get this polished up quickly. They let me know yesterday that they are even working on a Silverlight port of their library which could get interesting given SL's ability to leverage javascript. Birds Eye views, heat maps of demographics, Zestimates, raster overlays... the tools on today's real estate sights are amazingly powerful and empowering for consumers.

Capitol Hill, Seattle, 1992

Capitol Hill, Seattle, 2006

Looking at maps over time makes it easy to spot and monitor trends. Here are some observations from Tom to give you some ideas of interesting places to poke around in Hindsight

• many places have large spikes around 1900, we think this might be from the first time properties were assessed, and the assessor just made a guess - we don't know yet but it's the kind of question that's arising from browsing the data
• I'm personally astonished at the rate of development in some places - Atlanta, Dallas etc. - the suburbs are amazing, air conditioning has a lot to answer for :)
• the timeline shows just how sudden the growth stopped in places like Detroit

Currently Destroy Everything You Touch by Ladytron is playing

This months installment of the monthly imagery publish into Virtual Earth includes an amazing 11.5 terabytes of new data making it our largest update ever. Birds Eye imagery in Europe got a major boost including the completion of London.  High resolution aerial imagery from many of our partners worldwide rounds out the update. Here is a list of the new and updated areas:

3D Buildings

Manhattan, Queens, NY, Yonkers, NY, Cheektowaga, NY, Niagara, NY, Levis-St Romuald, Canada, Ottawa, Canada, Northampton, Great Britain, Austin, TX, Cincinnati, OH, Indianapolis, IN, Speedway, IN, Aurora, IL, Joliet, IL, Naperville, IL, Cape Coral, FL, Tampa, FL, Savannah, GA, Hollywood, CA, La Jolla, CA, La Mesa, CA, Miramar, CA, Oceanside, CA

Birds Eye Coverage From Blom

UK areas...

• London, Chelmsford, Weston Super Mare

Germany areas...

• Ertstadt, Heidelberg, Kerpen, Worms

Italy areas...

• Altamura, Andria, Barletta-Trani, Caserta, Cuneo, Manfredonia, Potenza, San_Servero, Avellino, Cava Tirreni, La Spezia, Cerignola, Ragusa, San Remo, Trapani

France areas...

• Niort, Cholet, Valence

Finland areas...

• Joensuu, Kuopio, Lahti, Tampere, Kotka, Pori, Oulu, Turku

Netherlands areas...

• Almere, Arnhem, Deventer, Emmen, Hardenberg, Hilversum, Smallingerland, Alkmaar, Amersfoort, Apeldoorn, Dordrecht, Ede, Eindhoven, Hoogeveen, Hoorn, Almelo, Leyl, Oost-Vlieland, Sittard, Assen, Bergen op Zoom, Gouda, Leeuwarden, Roosendaal

Spain areas...

• Avilla, Burgos, Gijon, Lugo, Ourense, Salmanca, Segovia, Vigo, Ponferrada, Zamora, PALE, Cuidad, Pontevedra, Santander, Girona, Torrelavega, Valladolid, Castellon de la Plana, Elda, Fuengirola, Granada, Mijas, Murcia, Velez

Norway areas...

• Skien, Fredrikstad

Switzerland area...

• St.Gall

Denmark areas...

• Kolding , Esbjerg, Fredso, Aalborg

Belgium areas...

• Aalst, Brugge, Charleroi, Gent, Hasselt, Kortrijk, Liege, Leuven, Mechelen, Mons, Oostende, Saint Niklaas, Tournai, Verviers

Hi-res Aerial from 3Di (using the UltraCam camera)

US areas...

• Savannah_GA, Toronto, SaintPaul_MN, Queens,Tampa, Yonkers, Bronx, Cape Coral, FL,  St. Petersburg Beach, Minneapolis

UK areas...

• Cardiff, NorthHampton, Gloucester, Bristol, Plymouth, Eastbourne, Wolverhampton, Swindon

Hi-res Aerial from GlobeXplorer/DigitalGlobe

• KansasCity/Metro-MO, Greenville-SC, South Collier County FL, Richmond-VA, Norfolk-VA, Chicago-IL,  Phoenix-AZ, Casa Grande-AZ, Tampa-St Petersburg, Sarasota-FL, South East Florida, Charlotte-NC, Massachusetts, New York City, Reno-Lake Tahoe, Monterey South Coast-CA, Madison-WI, Green Bay-Appleton-WI, Milwaukee-WI, Long Island-NY, Orange Co. California, Pittsburgh, Charleston

GeoEye 1m Satellite Aerial Worldwide

• US Virgin Islands , Taos , Fredericton, Charlottetown, Edwards Air Force Base , Regina , St. Johns , Victoria , Mt. Ranier , Whistler , Hot Springs NP , Acadia NP , Minsk , Prague , Lisbon , Bucharest , Sofiya , Odesa , Cairo , Madrid , Barcelona , Stockholm , Budapest , Athens , Montevideo , Victoria Falls , Mexico City , Mecca , CanberraAU , HZ_7 Kenya (Nairobi) , Iguaza Falls , A small bit of the Amazon Rain Forest , Cockbur Harbor , HarbourIsland , Gorda Cay , High Rocks , FreeTown , St Eustatius , Ayers_Rock , AngkorWat , Cancun_Carmen , Cozumel , George Town , Kingston , Nassau , Lautoka , St Barthelemy , Point a Pitre

All of Germany from Intergraph (InterMapServer)

• 1m coverage with a few 0.5m covered areas

France 0.5 meter orthos from InterAtlas

• Lyon, Orleans, Aix-Marseille

Towers of London From the South

Currently Not Even Jail by Interpol is playing

My favorite city is finally in 3D in Virtual Earth! Thousands of textured building models in New York City were published in this months building and imagery update to Virtual Earth. I'll have a list of all of the included cities posted a little later today, including 3D Birds Eye and hires aerial imagery. For now enjoy NYC.

Version 3.0.11 of Mapcruncher was released yesterday sporting a number of bug fixes and a couple of new features. If you aren't familiar with MapCruncher, it is an application that makes it easy to integrate raster map layers into your Virtual Earth applications. This Bike The Bus trip Planner is a great example of what is possible with Cruncher. Without a doubt the most interesting feature in this new release is the ability to render your crunched map layers directly to Amazon's S3 Storage. From the release notes:

Render directly to Amazon’s S3 web service. In the render panel, select the “S3” radio button. Create a credentials file (stored separately from your mashup .yum file) with your Amazon S3 credentials. Now when you render, your mashup becomes instantly available to the whole world!

A very convenient and cost effective way to get your maps online. Other new features in this release:

Register maps with lat/lon grids. If your source map has lat/lon markings, we’ve added features to speed registration. The lat/lon fields on the reference (Virtual Earth) map are editable, so you can jump directly to a specified lat/lon by typing it in. The lat/lon of pushpins appear  in a new column in the correspondences tab. Finally, you can use a menu option to toggle lat/lon displays between decimal degrees and degrees-minutes-seconds.

Navigate faster. The new overview source map menu item pops up an always-on-top windowlet that always shows the unlocked source map, nd doesn't track the zooming and panning operations in main window. The new menu options SnapView and SnapZoom let you record a view (or just a zoom level) and snap back to it later with a hotkey.

You can read the full changelog here.

Technorati tags: MapCruncher, AmazonS3

More cool image viewing technologies coming from Microsoft Research, the latest of which is HDview, allowing for smooth interaction with multi gigapixel images. Matthew Uyttendaele is one of the folks working on this and is primary contributor at the teams blog which is loaded with details.  

To learn more, view some panoramas, or even to create your own, here are some suggested links

• 4 Minute Video - This explains the technology really well including some of the challenges in creating and viewing the Panoramas.
• Digital Urban Blog - Comments from Andy Hudson-Smith who is working on related technologies
• Collection of featured Panoramas - There are hundreds of these panoramas already on the web. Here is a Collection of some of Matt's favorites geo-referenced on a VE map. The 'More Info' link in each items popup will take you to the viewer. He is adding to the Collection frequently so you may want to subscribe to its GeoRSS feed to stay up to date.
• Create your own - there are a few software options to assist with the creation of your own HD View content.

Currently Hoist That Rag by Tom Waits is playing

The Virtual Earth screensaver takes RSS feeds from Birds Eye Tourist and Virtual Globetrotting to select scenes to show on your PC as a screensaver. Keith is the creator of the screensaver and you can read all about it on his blog. The source has been released as well, so if you are a developer that wants to modify it or build your own screensaver its easy to get started.

• Install the Virtual Earth Screensaver. After install it will appear in the screensavers list in your control panel
• Get the Source code. Source and Visual Studio Project for developers.

It comes pre-configured to work with the RSS feeds mentioned above, but in the settings for the Screensaver you can specify your own RSS or GeoRSS feeds as well!

Currently Rose Parade by Elliott Smith is playing

The tech world seems to be all caught up in Microsoft's acquisition of aQuantive today. I hope the launch of Popfly doesn't get lost in the shuffle!! Popfly [Pipes for the rest of us] was made public today, at least as an early alpha release. This is definitely a technology I'll be keeping a close eye on as it's loaded with potential. In a nutshell, its a visual environment for creating web applications, gadgets, or mashups, but that simplistic summary doesn't do it justice. It scales well from the non programmer end of the spectrum all the way to a professional developer comfortable building applications. If you want a custom map on your website but have never written a line of code, Popfly is of interest to you. But if you're a Visual Studio stud with 10 years of application development behind you, Popfly is still interesting and works in the environment you're used to.

Get familiar with Popfly!

• Overview
• Screencast, featuring Virtual Earth integration in a couple of applications. Stick with this until the end, its worth the 15 minutes. Features like Intellisense for javascript make me happy :-)
• Try it out. Its an invite only preview right now, but you can signup on the homepage.
• How it started. Interesting look at the succession of events in the brief history of Popfly

Currently Summertime Cowboy by Husky Rescue is playing

Isaac Kunen is a Program Manager on the SQL Server team working on Spatial support in SQL Server 2008 [announcement] Here's his first post on the subject with hopefully many more to follow.

Currently Paw Paw Tree by The Fiery Furnaces is playing

Every 6 months or so I like to post something about rotating your view in Birds Eye mode for the new readers wandering through. Rotation is one of the coolest, but least discoverable, features in Virtual Earth. People who are inclined to poke around in a UI will discover that in Birds Eye mode the thing that looks like a traditional compass control actually rotates your view North, East, South, West, yielding not 1 but four unique views at each point on earth where coverage exists. This sequence of images of a house fire shown at Birds Eye Tourist illustrates this well. To capture the Birds Eye scenes, a low flying plane with five cameras mounted needed to cris-cross the sky in very tight formation. It takes some time for the plane to return in the opposite direction which is the reason for the steady progression of images through time, in this case showing before during and after fire damage.

To round out your Friday, check out this image of Stephen Hawking in Piazza San Marco in Photosynth.

Currently Obstacle 1 by Interpol is playing

Today at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, Ted Kummert, VP of the Storage Platform Division, introduced SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) in his keynote [Press Release]. Scheduled to ship in 2008, Katmai will be the first version of SQL Server to support spatial data and operations natively. Pretty cool! Finally, support for Spatial as a first class data type with indexing.    

Ed Katibah joined Microsoft in 2005 to begin work on bringing spatial support in SQL Server. Ed has amazing experience in this area having previously engineered spatial support in Informix and IBM's databases. If you work in this field, chances are you know Ed or have seen him around at the major GIS conferences. Here is a snip from his 'official' bio:

Ed Katibah has over 30 years of experience working with geographic information, starting in 1975 at the Remote Sensing Research Program, Univ. of California at Berkeley.  The last 11 years have been spent in spatial database development with Informix Software (Spatial and Geodetic DataBlade Modules) and IBM (Spatial and Geodetic Extenders). Ed joined the Microsoft SQL Server team in September 2005 as Spatial Program Manager, responsible for spatial/location intelligence data management.

There are Community Preview and early alpha builds being tested outside of Microsoft right now, but if you aren't testing there is limited information that has been made public. Here are a few bullets that are OK to share at this point -

• Spatial will be supported in the next release of SQL Server (code named Katmai) as system data types
• Katmai is scheduled to ship in 2008 and will most likely be called SQL Server 2008
• Katmai spatial will support two models: a “Flat Earth” planar data type and a “Round Earth” geodetic data type
• The Flat Earth data type (GEOMETRY) will support the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Simple Features for SQL Specification with support for approximately 70 spatial methods/functions
• There will be spatial indexes for both planar and geodetic data types

So, what do you think? Ed and the SQL Spatial team will be watching this thread. Let them know what you want to see in the final release or pass on any other comments you might have.

Currently In This Home On Ice by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is playing

The Google Earth blog has a link to some videos of Virtual Earth 3d in action from Digital Urban. Some very nice looking stuff - even Buffalo looks inviting ;-) Frank has a few things in his article that I found interesting and wanted to comment on. The first is a bit of a misconception about Virtual Earth and how the building models are created. The vast majority of the 3d buildings, bridges and other objects in our virtual world are indeed modeled and textured algorithmically. This allows us to add complete cityscapes to Virtual Earth quickly at a pretty good level of quality. Its a very innovative and compute intensive process and that probably leads to it getting as much attention as it does. But it should be noted that Virtual Earth supports models edited by people as well. Many of the models you see in VE today are created through traditional manual modeling applications. The Space Needle in Seattle is a good example of a structure that is difficult for a machine to model very well. The approach that our team in Boulder is taking is to algorithmically model the 1000's of buildings that make up a city and then replace the ones that need hand tuning, like the Space needle, most sports stadiums, etc...

The other comment that caught my eye is

Microsoft's system of automatically generating 3D models of cities from complex multi-angle aerial photos, while expensive, is definitely producing some impressive 3D model results.

Quite true that this is a very expensive process to get off the ground. The startup costs are astronomical and the complexity is daunting, but it scales very well - the cost per building comes way down if you plan to create models of 1000's of buildings (and that's just one city!). If you only wanted to model 1 or a handful of buildings you would grab your favorite 3d modeling package and have at it. But if you want to model all of say Manhattan or London, it would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Each approach is valid and has its place. I think that's why our 3d team opted to employ both.

Currently Smoke & Mirrors by RJD2 is playing

Cyberhomes is a very useful website when buying or selling your home. The mapping capabilities gracefully bring GIS layers to a simple to use web application loaded with great features and access to lots of information that a real estate agent would traditionally have access to. No one would launch a real estate site today that didn't have VE's Birds Eye imagery, so of course you'll find it in Cyberhomes, but there's a lot more. When you zoom in to street level parcel boundaries are displayed.

You can turn on various heat map overlays at different zoom levels in the main search interface, showing density, home values and value trends. The 'map Layers' dropdown list just above the map gives you access to these options as well as control of various point layers.

The application has a lot of powerful non-map capabilities as well - great tools for evaluating neighborhood comparable values, school information, demographics...  

Fidelity called on Digital Map Products and Neudesic to build the application. Arc2Earth was used to publish map tiles from ESRI data layers. Virtual Earth provides the visualization platform and other location services via the platform API's.

The line between GIS and the consumer web continues to blur. I'm hoping that Virtual Earth's liberal licensing for free commercial use will continue to accelerate this trend.

Currently Black Cat by Broadcast is playing

At Mix this week a lot of pretty exciting stuff was announced for developers. The biggest news was obviously the CLR running cross-platform as part of Silverlight and the introduction of the Dynamic Language runtime. This Interview with Scott Guthrie will get you up to speed on the former, and Jon Udell's brilliant phone conversation with John Lam goes deep on the DLR. John's iunknown blog has a wealth of information for those interested in Python and Ruby on the DLR.

Somewhere in the shadow of these huge announcements, new simplified licensing terms for the Windows Live Platform (WLP), including Virtual Earth, were rolled out. If you’re interested in using multiple services of the WLP, VE is covered as part of the broad license for the Platform. WLP is free for use on websites that have less than 1 million Unique Users and Commercial-use is completely supported in these terms of use! The license covers Contacts, Photos, Silverlight Streaming, Search, Virtual Earth, and Windows Live ID. As always, dev.live.com is the place to go for more info on any of the services of the WLP.

Currently I'm Going Out Of My Way by Stereolab is playing