Toluu

Live Maps / Virtual Earth

Act Global, Search Local

Subscribing to a KML file via RSSAugust 13

Here’s another super helpful trick to make it easy to keep up on news events being reported via KML. Ideally, timely information with a Geographic component would be published via GeoRSS feeds which would make it easy to consume in standard RSS readers. But often KML files are used instead as is the case of this ongoing account of the war between Georgia and Russia. The downside is that there is no easy way to be alerted when the author makes an edit or addition.

Live Maps has an easy fix for this. You can pluck an RSS feed for any KML file you are viewing at our site. Star by viewing the KML. Use the Mapurl parameter to specify the KML file you want to view like this:

http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=1217876

Once it loads, hit the subscribe  link to get your RSS feed

Exploring the Geography of Georgia – helpful tip to leverage UGCAugust 13

As Search Engine Land mentioned today, Live Maps has pretty decent maps in Georgia that have been useful to a lot of people looking to follow the news there (we get a lot of base map data from AND in the region). In some cities, like the capital city of Tbilisi, we have good high res aerial imagery as well. But basemaps and imagery should just be the first step of exploration in Live Maps; turning on the ‘Explore’ feature exposes tons of user contributed content from across the web and is a great way to learn about a region. We crawl and index sites like Platial, Virtual Globetrotting, wikipedia, Live Maps Collections and hundreds more to create a fantastic explore experience.

After doing a search for a City, you can hit the ‘Explore Collections’ link in the result panel or you can go to the Collections –> Explore Collections menu at any time. Once turned on, use the filtering tools in the result panel to change sort order, show only photos, filter by tag etc… As you drag and zoom the map, your results will refresh.

note - You may see a lot of duplicate

Avi Bar-Zeev joins the Virtual Earth teamAugust 4

Awesome to have Avi joining our team here at Microsoft. he’s got a pretty detailed post on his RealityPrime blog talking about his latest career change. here’s an excerpt -

In this current job search, one of the big companies actually surprised and impressed me, not only in their offer, but throughout the process, the people and professionalism. The two days of on-site interviews weren’t as much about testing my coding skills as they were about vision, work styles, and that ever-elusive "fit."

Turns out, I actually had fun. And in the end, my bosses-to-be offered exactly the kind of role I wanted with the freedom to define it myself — new, challenging, and some potentially very big wins on the horizon, straddling both R&D and productization with the goal of adding value wherever I can

Avi has contributed in big ways to some pretty well known software projects like Keyhole and Second Life. I’m looking forward to seeing what he sinks his teeth into next.

MSN Direct – new API enables OTA delivery to navigation systemsJuly 29

This past January we introduced a feature on Live Maps that enabled you to send a Collection to your compatible Navigation system over FM airwaves; Using the MSN Direct spot network any PC could ‘broadcast’ a series of navigation waypoints to compatible devices. This capability just became available to any website thanks to an API and also works with USB connected Nav devices. This Press release has most of the details. Garmin is a key partner for this service:

“As more and more consumers are using their PC to locate their desired destinations and then needing to find those exact locations on their GPS device, MSN Direct is making that process easier for our customers,” said Roger Jollis, Garmin’s director of OEM and mobile marketing. “Garmin was the first to offer MSN Direct on an automotive GPS, and we are pleased with MSN Direct’s newest innovation because it will be very helpful to our customers.”

We have of course updated the feature at Live Maps to take advantage of these new capabilities. Using it is simple – Create a Collection at Live Maps, then use the ‘Actions –> Send to GPS’ menu to initiate the send. Like this:

Microsoft trueSpace7.6 ships. Who should care?July 24

Animators, artists, graphic designers.

there’s lots of talk today around the release of trueSpace 7.6, especially now that its price has dropped from 700 dollars to zero. Most of the talk is from mapping and GIS focused blogs, which i guess is understandable since it was the mapping division of Microsoft that became the home for Caligari after they were acquired last year. and therefore its also understandable that many of the articles try to compare trueSpace with Google Sketchup. yes, both can export 3D models into virtual worlds (google earth and virtual earth respectively), but that is just the tip of the iceberg. its sorta like trying to compare Visual Studio to UltraEdit; Ultraedit is great for small solo projects but you wouldn’t use it to debug a remote web application.

trueSpace is an integrated application for modeling, animating and rendering with features like inverse kinematics for easy character animation, physics simulation, timeline based storyboarding, and ray traced rendering with motion blur and depth of fiel