It's been a rough month here on Earth as far as natural disasters go between the Cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China this week. One of the folks working on our local search team is from the Sichuan province, an area very near the center of the quake that was hit very hard. Happily for Hong she was able to reach her family as communications came back online and they were all ok, but for thousands more the news is not so good. if you want to help with a donation to the relief effort, Hong suggested the China Tomorrow Education Foundation, an organization focused on bringing education to children in rural areas, who have set up an earthquake relief fund this week.

For those in China, the Ditu.Live team is maintaining this map  of events. I also found this map animation and this BBC map helpful in understanding the geography.

A few months back I asked VE blog readers for some advice on my next mobile. After investigating a bunch of phones I finally settled on the AT&T Tilt and have been using it for a month or so and totally loving it. Overall its a fantastic smartphone, and for a geohacker its the ultimate all in one dream gadget.

Before I get to what it was that sold me on the Tilt I should answer the question of why no iPhone for me. There are a bunch of rabid iPhone users right here in my workgroup at Microsoft and we have 2 Macs at home so certainly no shortage of evangelists in my life selling me on the iPhone. I was willing to live with the slower network access on the iPhone due to lack of 3G (even though it seemed unthinkable on a 500 dollar phone!) And I was OK with relying on a bluetooth connected GPS for my mapping needs (more on that in a moment - I couldn't have been more wrong on this one). But in the end it came down to the fact that i couldn't stomach buying such a closed, locked down computing device. A world where a single entity controls what apps you can and can't run isn't one our industry should be working towards. If I build an application I should be able to give it to you and you should be able to use it. I have no interest in developing on any platform, desktop, mobile or otherwise, that offers anything less than that. I'm trying to imagine the reaction if another software vendor had tried to float this 1998 thinking as a developer platform strategy ;-) In the end, lots of sizzle and flash (no, not that flash)in the UI and an excellent web browsing experience shielded by a velvet rope designed to control what applications the consumer has access to just wasn't for me. If you read on you'll see that I run a bunch of apps on my phone and it'll become clear why the iPhone just wouldn't do it for me.

Why the Tilt?
If you look back at my wishlist you see that on the surface the Tilt is a pretty good fit; superfast internet access (plus WiFi. the the AT&T 3G net is so fast I hardly use it though**), runs Slingplayer, keyboard, unlocked GPS, easy to develop for, etc... But as with any piece  of consumer electronics, its how you feel after living with it for a week that really matters. The Tilt hasn't disappointed; the build is amazingly good (slide the keyboard open to understand what i mean), its plenty fast and has lots of memory (256 megs, up to 32 gigs expansion via microSD)... My only gripe is that the installed browser is severely lacking in features which I took care of with Opera. Battery life is acceptable, but if you are running WiFi, GPS, etc... a lot, you'll need to get it on the charger each night.

** while I hardly use WiFi to surf the net, I HAVE been using this app to turn my phone into a wifi Access Point. Totally sick! It uses the phones 3G connection to send/receive to the internet, and becomes a low power wifi router so anyone nearby can connect to the net using standard wifi via their Laptop.

What about Maps and GPS?
Killer! I had no idea how much having a built in GPS would change my life, until i lived with it. With my last phone i used an external GPS via bluetooth and found that when i needed it, i had often not brought it along. one more thing to remember to carry. as a result, over time I found I hardly ever used it. I've used the GPS on the Tilt more in 4 weeks than I have in the previous 2 years. when its always there, you start using it in ways you never would otherwise. one very nerdy example - i was at a music festival 2 weeks ago where parking was basically a giant open field, without lights or section marks. I snapped a waypoint each day when going in, then used the Tilt's GPS to guide me back to our car each night.

I mentioned above that the Tilt with its unlocked GPS is a perfect for building your own applications. If you're so inclined, I suggest getting started with the open source GPSTracker on Codeplex; very well written C# code that is easy to modify. I added KML export and a couple of minor features in 30 minutes! It will work with any WinMo device that has a GPS be it built in or Bluetooth.

And finally, if you have a WinMo or Blackberry and you haven't installed Live Search Mobile, do it now, thank me later. Voice command, directions, GPS navigation, maps, aerial imagery, movie times, gas prices, Business Search... and the forthcoming release packs my favorite feature which I'm not allowed to tell you about just yet.

Marie Thirlwall, Product Manager for Microsoft in the UK, sent me some information about MultiMap and how starting today (hopefully by the time you are reading this) UK visitors to MSN.com who are looking for maps and directions will be served by MultiMap. Folks who visit maps.live.com will continue to get the same mapping experience they enjoy today. Choice is good! By the way, check out this review comparing 7 mapping/trip planners in the UK in which MultiMap received top marks-

The hugely customizable routes were the only ones to match our sat-nav and offered lots of information, including weather conditions and public transport options. The satellite and standard map facilities impressed, and route calculation was super-fast.

Back to the announcement at hand, here are all the details from Marie:

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 localized 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 recognize, 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.

For a recent project I was working on, I needed to overlay lines of latitude and longitude on the map. I had a hard time finding some so I created 10 degree and 30 degree grids. Below you can view each of them as a Collection which you can export to KML, GeoRSS or GPX and you can also grab the exported KML for each. I figured someone else must have use for this as well. If you grab the KML files you can easily edit the styles (1 for latitude, 1 for longitude) or make whatever tweaks you need.

10 Degree Lines: Collection or KML

30 Degree Lines: Collection or KML

This weeks episode of CSI featured Photosynth being used to recreate a high school gym in 3d from a set of photos taken by dozens of phone cameras. It was cool that they used Photosynth 'as is' with very little post production lipstick; its high-techy enough on its own without the need for the usual ridiculous embellishments TV and movies usually rely on to portray cutting edge tech. Here's a clip that shows the Photosynth segments-

You may have noticed that many articles in Wikipedia are location specific and the coordinate that ties the article to a place on earth appears in the upper right corner. For instance, have a look at the Wikipedia article for Temple of Concord and take note of the coordinates link at the upper right corner of the page. If you click it you are taken to a page where you can view a map of the location of the Temple to provide geographic context to the article you are reading. This is an easy way to see the geography for an individual article, but what if you want to go the other way? what if you are interested in a particular geography and want to see all of the Wikipedia articles in the region?

We've been indexing all of them in our Spatial Search and Explore indexes making it easy to now surf Wikipedia on a map in your browser. to try it out, just turn on Live Map's 'Explore feature and then select the Wikipedia Tag. Try it out! This link will take you to Rome with the Wikipedia layer turned on. As you drag the map, the layer will continuously refresh. You can turn on Explore at ay time by going to the Collections --> Explore  menu in Live Maps. 

Turn on Birds Eye view for an amazing visual exploration experience. Each pin on the map represents a Wikipedia article. Hover over each for details and a link to open the full article at Wikipedia.

You can also turn on Explore after doing a Place search. For example, after a search for Mumbai you can click the Explore link in the result panel to dive right in.

At that point you are presented with information from all across the Geoweb. Be sure to select the Wikipedia tag in the tag list if all you want to see is Wikipedia articles.

Have fun. and be careful - its addicting Exploring Wikipedia this way and will eat up many hours.

Oh! one more thing. in addition to Explore, you can search for these Wikipedia articles as well. Enter your search phrase and make sure you are on the Collections Scope, then hit search.

This months Virtual Earth Imagery update brings Birds Eye imagery to two new Countries - Australia and Greece. Actually, Greece had a bit of coverage already but since it is so greatly expanded this month it is worth calling out here. Chris has a great run down on all of the geographies that received new imagery this month.

Turning on Collections Explore is a great way to interactively learn about an area and discover landmarks and other high profile Points of Interest in an area. you can turn on Explore at any time by using the 'Collections --> Explore' menu item to turn on a layer of points of interest created entirely by individuals across the web. Once Explore is on, take advantage of the sort and filter options to tailor your results. You can choose to see only items with a photo attached for instance.

Some Examples

• All items in Volos, Greece
• Entries in Hobart, Tazmania Tagged 'wikipedia'
• Photos around Sydney

Coachella and the New Orleans Jazz Fest kick off the summer frenzy of music festivals this weekend. I'm heading to Coachella to get summer started a little early - we need it here in Seattle where the gray of winter has extended unusually long this year. 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. I still need to add a bunch so you might want to   to my Collection's RSS reed to stay updated.

Last week I showed you how you can use Live Maps as a friendly means of building itineraries for use on your Personal Navigation Device (PND) from Garmin, TomTom, etc...

Kip from the LiveSide blog followed up a couple of days later with this 3 minute companion video showing you how to do the export from Live Maps to a GPX or KML file for use on your PND (or any other application or website that can read one of these formats)

These posts lead a number of people to ask me "Is it possible to do the opposite - I want to get a trail from my GPS or Navigation system into Live Maps". No problem - we have had import capability in Live Maps for GeoRSS, KML and GPX files since last year. As an example, here is a 36 mile trail captured on a Garmin Edge Cycling GPS.

Assuming your device can save a KML or GPX file, the import process is easy.

1. Go to Live Maps and sign in with your Live ID.
2. Select the 'Collections -> Open Your Collections' menu
3. Click the 'Import' Button
4. Select your KML or GPX file to import. Give your new Collection a name or choose to have this trail appended to one of your existing Collections.
5. Press Import and wait a moment while your trail is loaded.

Once loaded you can email it to a friend with the 'Share' link in the upper right. It will also be discoverable by other users who search and explore at Live Maps. THis is an easy way to build and share catalogues of your trips, runs, hikes, etc...

If you are building applications with the Virtual Earth Map control, here are a bunch of recent newsy items.

Verison 6.1 API released - last week the API was rev'd to 6.1. new features include Walking Directions and reverse geocoding and a bunch more. Full details in the VE Dev Center. read more Here, Here, and Here.

VE Intellisense Helper - If you use Visual Studio to build your Virtual Earth apps, be sure to grab the latest Intellisense Helper to synch up with all the new 6.1 stuff. It makes writing javascript almost fun.

Dave Bouwman's Blog - I learn something new every time I visit - there are precious few map/gis blogs, dev or otherwise, that I can say this about so be sure to add this to your feed list. Dave is my Coding Horror in the mapping world!

3D Developer Blog - Members of the Virtual Earth 3D Dev team have started a blog... about  programming with VE3D :-)  The scoop doesn't get any more inside than this. learn how to use the VE3D map control in a WinForm app among many other great tips.

I saw this story on WebWare tonight about how Sungevity is using Virtual Earth's Birds Eye View to assist in determining how much you could benefit from installing solar panels on your roof. From WebWare -

The company's secret sauce is a trigonometry-heavy application that can take satellite imagery and create a 3D model of a house. From the model, Sungevity calculates the pitch of the roof, the azimuth (for instance, where the house faces in relation to compass points) and the available area. Sungevity uses data from Microsoft Virtual Earth rather than Google Earth for its satellite imagery. Google Earth only provides a top-down view of a roof. Virtual Earth gives data from different angles, which lets Sungevity calculate pitch.

I'm always surprised at how often I see this innocent error. Maybe it only matters to map nerds, but reality is that the best aerial imagery you see online doesn't come from Satellites. That goes for 'straight down' ortho imagery as well as the 45 degree view of Birds Eye Imagery. The cameras used in aircraft based photography capture at higher resolutions, but it's color range and accuracy where they really excel. But back to Finding a Solar panel for your roof - Sungevity only services the state of California right now. According to one estimate from the Webware story the upfront cost is a lot less than it was a couple of years ago. The mapping interface built by Sungevity is visually nice, providing a 'lens' with which to manually pinpoint your house.

This past Holiday shopping season the price point of portable navigation devices (PND) from manufacturers like Garmin, LG, Mio, Tom Tom and many others fell under the magic 200 dollar price point and they flew off the shelves. One of the most tedious tasks on a PND is entering and searching for waypoints - the small UI isn't ideal for text entry. Fortunately most of these devices allow you to import waypoints (stops on an itinerary) that you created on your PC or Mac. With our latest release last week, Live Maps became the first major web mapping site with broad support for these PND's. You can now do your trip planning online in the convenience of your web browser and then take your itinerary on the road in your PND.

In this tutorial I'll show you how to use Live Maps to build a Collection of Waypoints and then export them to your Portable Navigation Device. Since I'm heading to the Coachella festival next week, our tutorial will build a Collection of the places that will be important to have with me on the trip - airport, hotel, concert site, and a suggested restaurant. Step 1 will show you how to add items to your Collection via address search, business search, and even interactively right-clicking on the map to indicate a stop. Then most importantly, in Step 2 we'll export the Collection to your Portable Navigation Device.

Step 1 - Create a Collection of waypoints that we want to get on our PND.

Let's look at three different ways to add items to your trip.

Location Search. Do a search for "palm springs airport". Live Maps will put an orange marker on the airport location. Hover over the marker and select 'Add To Collection'. Your first item is now added to your itinerary. In a moment we'll see how you can edit, move, and re-order the items on your collection before exporting to your PND. But first lets look at some other ways to add items to our trip.

Business Search. Do a search for "Courtyard Palm Desert, CA". Live Maps will display all of the Courtyards in the area. Hover over the one you want to add to your Collection and choose 'Add to Collection' just as we did a moment ago for the airport. This time, in the confirmation panel choose 'View this Collection' to display the Collection editor. In it you will see the 2 items we have added to our itinerary.

Create a New Pushpin. Next we want to add the Concert site. Do a search for "Coachella music festival". Live Maps doesn't have a listing for the festival, but in the result panel you can choose 'See results contributed by other people' to discover the location of the festival. Cool! Double click around the cluster of results to zoom in. Best to turn on Aerial maps at this time to get a good look at the concert grounds. You can see where the main event takes place on the polo field, and you can see the nearby parking area. Lets add the parking area to our Collection. Right-Click on the parking area and choose 'Add a Pushpin'. Fill in a Title and optional description for your new pin and hit the Save button. You have three items in your Collection now.

Optionally Edit, Move and Re-order your Itinerary. You can hover over any of the items in the Collection editor and hit 'Edit' to change their title, add a photo, etc... To refine the location on the map you can drag the pushpins around interactively. You may also want to re-order items on your itinerary. I added a rental car location to my trip, and it was appended at the end of the list by default. To move it to the second slot (after the airport) hover over it on the Collection editor and drag it up the list using the drag handle as shown below.

Step 1B - Optionally Save Your Collection

If you think you'll want to return to your list at some time in the future to make edits and additions, you can save it. If you choose to save it you can visit Live Maps any time in the future, sign in, and access any of your Collections. This is a convenient way to save and manage a library of itineraries over time.  Sales people can manage Collections of all of the ir client locations, Save a Collection for each of your family road trips, Collect a list of Restaurants you want to try... Saving is simple - Click the 'Save it now' link at the top of the Collection editor, give your Collection a friendly name, then hit Save.

Another advantage of saving is that you can then easily share your Collection with friends. Here is a link to my Collection that we have been building in this tutorial.

Step 2 - Export Your Collection

Live Maps can export your Collection to three different file formats - KML, GPX, or GeoRSS. Check the documentation that came with your PND to see which of these it supports. Once you know which File format your device supports, exporting is easy! On the Collections editor select the 'Actions -> Export' menu and  click the file format you want to export to. When prompted, give your file a name like MyCoachellaTrip.KML and hit save. You now have a file containing all of the points from your Collection saved on your PC. How you copy this file to your PND will vary between manufacturers, so be sure to again check the manual that came with your PND for details. For instance, most of the MIO's can be connected to your PC via a USB cable and you copy the file directly to it. Other devices use a special program that came with your PND to copy GPX and KML files to the PND. regardless of how you copy your Collection to the device, next time you turn it on you should be able to access all of the locations added to your Collection in Live maps and set them as destinations for Navigation. No clumsy text entry on the PND.

In an era when the cost** of running a data center far outweighs that of building a data center I was glad to see this story in Data Center Knowledge earlier this week featuring mention of the new Virtual Earth Container based data center in Boulder that is 100% wind powered. [more in Boulder's Daily Camera] This cluster of three trailer sized portable data centers is used for offline processing of the imagery you see in Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D as well as creation of the 3D building models. Jerry  has some amazing stats (5000 cores!) on the VE Public Sector blog, as well as a couple of photos of the containers inside and out. This is a nice step - we have numerous larger datacenters for online serving that hopefully one day soon could also be powered by alternative energy sources.

** Cost as in total cost including energy, cooling and environmental impact

The Keyhole Markup language (KML) is a means of representing geographic information in a simple XML file making it easy to share map data among different creation and visualization systems. Ever since Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 (the original creators of Google Earth) they have steadily expanded the KML syntax leading up to KML 2.2 which is used widely by dozens of mapping applications today.  This Monday KML became an industry standard approved by the OGC - read the details here on CNET where the news was first released and learn more about KML2.2.

Live Maps first started to support KML last year when we introduced the ability to import KML files into Collections or view KML hosted on the web. This week we released a nice upgrade with improved support for KML including better styling and presentation. In fact, the CNET article uses a screenshot from Live Maps illustrating the effect of global warming on national parks using data from the National Resources Defense Council that was provided in KML format. The KML Overlay is very rich showing the boundaries of the parks along with some text for each. The CNET author comments that the map loads slowly in Live Maps. To compare I loaded the same KML file in Google Maps and it was indeed much quicker (15 seconds and 5 seconds respectively). But then I noticed something interesting - on Google Maps the polygons representing the parks didn't load at all. Live Maps took longer as it was reading, parsing, and displaying the entire KML file. Its nice to see Live Map's KML support coming along as quickly as it is! Our work is definitely not done as we e still have a lot of KML workitems on the backlog ... expect even more improvements and better KML support in our upcoming releases.

Click each screengrab below to view the national parks KML in Live Maps and Google Maps respectively

and for the hardcore mapping nerds, further discussion of KML 2.2 and its becoming a standard can be found here on Spatially Adjusted. is KML the poor mans GML? or is it a great means of easily sharing Geo Data? enter the fray if you dare... Personally, I'd say both. KML is a great tool for the right job, but depending on the job you may need to expand your toolbox. I like the "KML is to to GML what HTML is to SGML" analogy. My first job as a software developer was at a publisher building document management systems based on SGML. Verbose, complex, unlimited flexibility, perfectly suited for machine maintained data (no one would want to edit an SGML document and its related DTD by hand!) Along came HTML, carelessly slamming content and style together in a single file with limited syntax that was pretty easy to edit with a plain text editor. A nightmare for data management purists, but liberating for the masse. To this day both have their place in this world and their own strengths not shared by the other. HTML's weaknesses have been addressed over time (CSS for instance) and continues to evolve. Are KML and GML any different? I think the parallels are very clear.

Mac users running Firefox as their browser have been able to use Live Maps for a long while. I'm happy to report that those who prefer Safari on the Mac can now experience the web's highest resolution aerial imagery and other Live Maps goodness as well! Here is a brief mention in the Dutch language MacFreak; hope they said something nice. Hey - who wants to lend a hand and update the Live maps Wikipedia entry regarding Safari compatibility. I would do it but...

And below, courtesy of Dave Stewart (VE dev lead) is a look at Live Maps on the iPhone's Safari Browser.

From Dave - Until the new iPhone firmware release in June, you won’t be able to pan or zoom the map directly on the map surface, but the onscreen navigation controls work fine in that regard. Note that this is an untested configuration and there are bound to be bugs, but if you have an iPhone give it a try.

Lots of Maptivity in the UK this week - Ask.com customers in the UK are now served by MultiMap.com for their map related queries. Try it out by clicking the image below or going to http://uk.ask.com and doing a search for a city or place.

In the results the Map and Directions links will take you to MultiMap to complete your route.

You may have seen this announced in February; DreamSpark gets the full suite of Microsoft's Professional Developer tools like Visual Studio and Expression to students free of charge! Awesome. Studio is hands down the best IDE available today and probably the best piece of software Microsoft has ever released. Now students don't have to make difficult trade offs like beer money or IDE. If you're a student, download yours today.

While you're at the Channel 8 site loading up on Free Dev tools, check out Stefan Weitz's video tour of Live Maps features including Collections, Tours and 3D Birds Eye navigation, then get started creating.

While I appreciate Stefan's enthusiasm, I should point out that the 3D features of Virtual Earth do require a small download. BOOM!

Via the Mapperz blog this morning I came upon this great tutorial for loading ESRI .Shp files in Virtual Earth applications. The solution relies on the open source SharpMap project for converting the objects to VE Shapes. 

Big thanks to Marco Anastasi for putting together such an elegant and complete sample for Developers.

As part of our Import Feature in Live Maps we have considered adding support for ESRI shape files. Currently you can import KML, GPX and GeoRSS files into Collections at Live Maps. If there is sufficient demand from our customers we could add support for SHP files as well. What do you think? Is this something you would want to see as part of Live Maps import? or would it make more sense as to add support for ESRI SHP files to our API? or both :-) Let us know in comments here or by emailing your opinion to stevelom at microsoft d com.