Virtual Earth / Live Maps

MVP developer Chris Pietschmann posted some nice javascript code for determining if a coordinate is in a polygon.  Chris started with code from this MSDN tutorial and focused on simplifying the polygon case. Both articles together should give you everything you need to know for drawing shapes and testing for containment in your client code. for the full spec on drawing with Virtual Earth, steal some code from the interactive SDK.

A big update to http://ditu.live.com/ went out yesterday featuring real time traffic information in Beijing and a free Send to Mobile feature for local search results and transit information. Transit info is now available in 31 cities and many new subway lines have been added for existing areas. Other improvements since V1 include lots more geocoding coverage and refreshed map tiles representing the latest vector street data. click the image below to try it out -

This morning’s news [SearchEngineLand | Chris P Blog] that Ask.com’s maps and directions site has migrated from an application built on deCarta’s (formerly Telcontar) mapping platform to Virtual Earth got me wondering about the future of self hosting of mapping infrastructure for high volume sites. The question isn’t if there is a future here at all, there is. In fact the Virtual Earth appliance is offered to our customers with really specialized needs (off the grid or lots of custom pre-rendered data are a couple of good cases)  My question is how big this already niche market will become.

If your web based map app calls for supreme control and customization of cartography you historically would build your own cluster around ESRI’s universe of software and get to coding. For small to mid sized apps this was OK assuming you could make the development investment, but it broke down when scaling forced you to build out that cluster. this is where hosted solutions like Virtual Earth come in – you trade off a level of control (you don’t like our highway shields? sorry) for infinite scalability and performance.  Both are viable models for building your app and you could go with whichever worked for you. But Telcontar was offering a third option that always seemed to me to be the worst of both worlds – the limited control of hosted with all of the hosting and maintenance costs of building your own. Not everyone agrees with me of course and that’s the beauty of our free market, but i still don’t understand why someone would go this route for core maps/routes/geocoding. I’m biased as i want to see everyone building with VE of course, but if you have some insight into the deCarta model clue me in with a comment.

This brief mail came to me this AM from Vincent Tao who leads many of Microsoft's mapping and GIS initiatives in China -

CCTV (China Central Television) is the largest Chinese Broadcasting Company who owns the exclusive Olympics broadcasting rights for China. We just released the first version of VE integrated with CCTV Olympics site for ‘Euro Soccer Game 2008’. For the next phase, VE will be integrated with CCTV for the Olympics events.

Loopt co-founder Sam Altman was onstage yesterday at Apple's DevCon to launch the Loopt client app for iPhone. You can see it in action in this 2 minute video from ZDNet:

Loopt helps you keep tabs on your friends whereabouts from your mobile. One big difference between Loopt and most similar apps is that you don't need to continuously update your location manually; on location aware devices this is automated eliminating the 'stale location' problem many other apps suffered from. Loopt currently works on about 65 handsets with more on the way.

A couple of weeks ago I was commenting to our imagery team that the area around Mt Rushmore would be a great addition to our Birds Eye library; its one of the most recognizable landmarks in the US, but because of its remote location i guessed that only a small percent of folks had visited in person to see it and explore the area. now just a couple of weeks later I see it pop up in Birds Eye. I didn't realize i had that kind of influence with the imagery team :-)

The West view is pretty amazing. South is OK too, for seeing some of the behind the scenes goop on the mountain.

Whether my subjective opinion of their projects is positive or negative, I'm always intrigued by the work of Stamen Designs. Like a piece of art, i don't always know how to feel about it on first encounter but am compelled to dig further into it and develop an opinion. Within their somewhat experimental UI's usually lies a nugget of genius worth panning for. Their latest effort for Trulia, the Snapshot Geo-Photo viewer, has that in spades. I initially felt powerless against the undulating wiggly-armed photo monsters, but after playing with the slider and options at the bottom it started to feel pretty comfortable even reminding me of a few elements of the Photosynth UI. Techcrunch describes it as being Jello-like. shop around for homes in your area to give it a try.

My thanks to Tom Carden of Stamen for sending this my way. Some comments from Tom-

It's an alternative view of the homes currently listed for sale on trulia.com, and first and foremost it's about browsing photos on a map in a playful way. You can search for any city in the USA and either click around the map, scroll the slider or just hit the big play button and sit back and watch!

Once again we're using Virtual Earth imagery in Flash and we're really pleased with effect we came up with. We think the black inverted maps really make the photos pop out.

Matthew Quinlan from our office in the UK brings news of Mashed 08 this June 21st-

We’re delighted to announce that we’re partners for Mashed 08, and the next 100 tickets are available exclusively through Multimap and Microsoft. The event promises to be a great blend of hacking and mixing, with maybe even some sleeping thrown in. If you didn’t attend Hack Day last year, you missed out. I’d encourage you to make your way to Alexandra Palace on Saturday 21st June and get mashed.

So, the important bit. We have 100 tickets now available here. You’ll need the code, which is “microsoft”.

If you miss out, keep watching because more tickets will be released over the coming weeks. Hope to see you there.

The second major release of Live Maps for China is out and can be accessed at http://ditu.live.com. Congrats to our engineering team in China for getting this big update out - it represents many months of coding and brings some great improvements to map surfers in China. It also brings an API for developers and a localized SDK.  Qingsong is a Program Manager on the maps team in Beijing and has this rundown on the release.

I am pleased to announce that VE China 'Goliath'' release is live on http://ditu.live.com. Here is a list of the new and improved areas-

• VE China API for developers, with VE China SDK documentation on Chinese MSDN.
• Pinyin support for map search query
• Business photos on the details page
• Transit -  Improved route quality; better estimation of trip time; refreshed transit data for all 11 cities.
• Geocoding - Support Pinyin correction; geocoding match rate greatly improved
• New process for monthly data update leading to more timely and accurate maps and Business listings

...and boy are my arms tired. but at least I was able to capture some fabulous DIY aerial imagery along the way.

If that isn't funny to you, you probably weren't in Burlingame for the Where Conference this week. Chris Anderson showed off his unmanned drone built from toys and readily available off-the-shelf components. Completed with a camera phone that accepted remote commands via SMS and captured aerial photos, he had a DIY aerials capture system for well under a thousand bucks. On the same theme, on Tuesday Pict'Earth showed what they are doing to enable all of us to create our own layers of aerial imagery. Both were very thought provoking and inspirational presentations and definitely among the highlights of the event.

Leading the list of low-lights had to be Jeremy Bartley getting a vaudevillian hook after 5 minutes that would have embarrassed even Henny Youngman. I though the allotment of 5 minutes in the schedule was a typo, but sadly it wasn't. Has reality TV eroded our collective attention span to the point where 5 minutes of thinking is all we can handle? 

Other impressive presenters included Skyhook's Ryan Sarver on standardizing a Geolocation API for browser based apps and Adrian Holovaty from Everyblock. Oh! and going back to Monday, Steve Coast's deep dive on Open Street Map was my favorite session of the 3 days. Lots of great insight into the current state of the OSM project in a well paced entertaining presentation. If you aren't familiar with OSM, take a few minutes to poke around on the website and learn a little about what i see as one of the most ambitious mapping efforts ever - to create a freely available street level map of the entire world.

Two Henny Youngman references in one post. not bad. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that the "I just flew in..." joke originated with him. Anyone have a definitive citation of the source?