Another big day for Virtual Earth in the portal space. Granted, it's our own search portals but it's great to see the platform getting more use and exposure worldwide. Live Search Maps China has expanded it's offering (just in time for the Olympics). Live Search Maps Australia just launched (shortly after we added Bird's Eye coverage for Australia).

The Live Search Maps China site (or DITU) has the following additions and improvements:

• Real-time Traffic in Beijing
• Send-to-Mobile for free for local search and transit routing result
• Transit data refresh for existing 11 cities including 3 new subway in Beijing (No.10, Airport and Olympic).
• Expanded coverage from 11 to 31 cities. 
• Geocoding and Local Search
• Data refresh for existing 114 cities including Olympic Venues.
• Support city and county name geocoding for areas outside of 114-city coverage.
• Olympic query relevance improvement
• Local search category refinement
• Map refresh for 10 existing major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc.
• Expanded tile coverage for 30 more cities, totally 289 cities now.

The Live Search Maps Australia site is new and includes data from Virtual Earth, NineMSN and Yellow (Pages). If you get redirected to Live Search Maps (US) you can access the Australian site via Ninemsn.com.au, click "maps" above the search box and search for an Australian city or place.

Oddly, I couldn't find "vegemite" in "Sydney" so I'm starting to think this sandwich that Men At Work sang about doesn't exist. I might be down under for Tech Ed Australia in September to find out for myself. Stay tuned.

CP

Not too long ago I posted an entry about the adoption of the Virtual Earth platform by the New York City Transit to power their Trip Planner. The  service allows visitors and residents to get walking directions for their travel itinerary within the City and, since February, features Virtual Earth maps for a much richer visualization experience.

The NYCT recently issued the below announcement boasting the success of the easy to use site due to positive customer experience.

MTA NYC Transit Trip Planner Surpasses 10,000-Daily User Milestone

Customers Appreciate Ease of Website

Trip Planner, MTA NYC Transit's online travel itinerary service surpassed a usage milestone recently, logging over 10,000 combined unique visitors to the web-based service http://tripplanner.mta.info/ and mobile service On the Go! http://tripplanner.mta.info/mobile. On an average weekday, more than 10,000 customers are planning travel itineraries through Trip Planner. The program has experienced steady growth in use since the site went live in December 2006, allowing customers to obtain travel itineraries using NYC Transit's subway and bus network, Staten Island Railway and MTA Bus.

"Trip Planner has allowed NYC Transit to expand our travel information operations to a digital platform which, in turn, has given us the ability to provide better and more relevant service to a greater number of customers than we could ever do by phone alone," said NYC Transit President Howard H. Roberts, Jr. "Customers can now plan a trip when they want - from the comfort of their home, office or even their web enabled phone or PDA using our Trip Planner mobile service On the Go! It has changed the way we do business," added Roberts.

Customer feedback regarding Trip Planner has been overwhelmingly positive, with many citing the website's ease of use, while others appreciate the three travel options provided with every itinerary request. That high level of customer satisfaction has translated into steady growth in the number of daily users. By the end of last year, more than 5,600 customers used Trip Planner during an average weekday to obtain travel itineraries for destinations within the five boroughs. As of June 19, this year's average weekday use of Trip Planner grew to 10,060, an increase of 170% over the same period in 2007, while average weekend day use grew to 7,906, an increase of 193% when compared to 2007. The use of the Trip Planner mobile service, On the Go!, has also seen steady growth from a daily average of 270 visits in October 2007 to 436 visits during June.

Recent enhancements, including the incorporation of Navteq® Map Data and Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ into Trip Planner provides users with a more realistic street grid view and helps them better visualize the walking instructions that accompany their travel itinerary use. Another recently added feature allows Trip Planner users to overlay the actual area subway routes and stations over the street grid, a feature programmed into the application by NYC Transit's Internet Technologies Group.

Additional planned upgrades to Trip Planner - due to be released by the end of the 3rd quarter of this year - include more robust service advisory information, additional trip planning tools and mapping capabilities.

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 -

Ask.com has migrated off of their mapping platform and onto Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform. If you navigate to maps.ask.com you will now see Virtual Earth (or MapPoint Web Service for those who don't have supported browsers or JavaScript is disabled).

Virtual Earth has been initially inserted into quite a few of the Ask offerings:

Ask Maps:

Business Search (City):

Smart Answers (Web Search):

Smart Answers - Movies (Web Search):

Of course, they've included Bird's Eye:

Ask follows suit of many portal sites to letting Microsoft make the investments in infrastructure, imagery / photography acquisition, data updates, etc., etc., etc. The list includes the likes of YellowPages.com, Superpages.com, and WhitePages.com to name a few. Allowing us to do the heavy lifting in building out a robust mapping platform allows customers to focus on developing applications that benefit end users.

CP

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.

I was at a customer location recently and they asked me, "Why is your control so big? My performance is being hurt by having to reload this huge map control every time I load my page." Hmm, time to investigate....

I opened up Firebug in Firefox and took a quick peek at the Virtual Earth Map Control...

891kb!!! Wow! That is huge. Something's wrong.

I'll give you the abridged version of what I found. Some corporate networks using proxy servers strip gzip compression. We use compression to shrink the size of the control to improve performance when distributing it to end users. If your proxy is removing the compression you get the 891kb version of the control (as seen above). The good news is most likely this WILL NOT filter down to your end users who are home using your web site - they'll be on a network connection without a proxy (or a broad proxy with compression honored); however, for your testing purposes you may see significant latency when downloading the control. You may also see a 891kb file! Don't freak out. Just send a nice e-mail to your friendly IT guys and ask them to enable gzip compression on the proxy server.

With compression, the control is sized 202kb. So, enable compression. Your network will thank you for it.

CP

Juan DoNeblo has the skinny on rendering your ESRI .shp files on Virtual Earth. This is a fantastic how-to that was posted back in April around the time of the ESRI Developers Summit. Microsoft has a strong partnership with ESRI as they are one of the top Microsoft ISVs.

What's unique about the integration Juan depicts and what's been shown to date, is that Juan renders all of the information in vector format. Most folks rasterize their GIS data and use the map.AddTileLayer() method for viewing the data. The benefit of using VEShape class instead is that the vector information becomes interactive and you can use VE Map Events to provide additional information about each respective shape. In ESRI ArcGIS Server 9.3, you can natively render ESRI tiles (cache) onto Virtual Earth. In fact, I showed this in my ESRI Developer Summit Microsoft Special Interest Group presentation.

I posted my ESRI Developers Summit 2008 Virtual Earth presentation to SlideShare (a nifty site for hosting presentations). You can view my code samples from the preso there.

Now, the performance benefit is debatable because it depends on the number of vertices in your polygons / points in your vector data versus the size of your map control and number of custom raster (cache) tiles you're downloading to the client. Make sure you run your counters before you push to production.

CP

Well, since we (The Virtual Earth Group) virtualize the world many of their projects have synergies with The Virtual Earth Platform. I figured it would be worth while to share a few of them:

Microsoft Technology Powers Environmental Crisis–Response Tool - When a crisis strikes, timing is an organization's greatest resource, and often means the difference between containment and escalation. Enter JEPRS, the Joint Emergency Planning & Response System.

Virtual Earth Brings Limited Water Resource into Focus - The new Microsoft Virtual Earth-based groundwater management tool is designed to overcome a simple but daunting problem: mapping out areas of intensive groundwater use, determining management actions for stressed aquifers, and making that information quickly and widely available.

Microsoft Virtual Earth Puts the Planet in Focus (EPA) - Earth imagery in support of environmental science has reached a new level with Microsoft Virtual Earth, a globe mapping and geospatial visualization tool. With its superb imagery, integration with widely used Microsoft tools, and enterprise-level capability, Virtual Earth is creating yet another transformation in how we view the planet.

Also, I blogged a while back about how The Environmental Protection Agency is leveraging Virtual Earth for their applications too (referencing the "Microsoft Virtual Earth Puts the Planet in Focus" article. The blog entry has additional information about the relationship and the press release.

You should expect to see exciting green developments coming from this team. And, since almost everything they do can leverage Virtual Earth, expect VE to play a critical role for them as they grow. Got a green app that uses Virtual Earth? Share it with me.

CP

Catherine Heller and I did these videos last year for Channel 10 and for some reason I never found out they were published...until today. They're still valid (for the most part) though much has changed with the Live UI. It can provide you with some Virtual Earth API and Live Search Maps enjoyment...at the very least you can watch us make fools of ourselves trying to be TV personalities. Get some popcorn. No, get Kettle Corn. That stuff is awesome! Just work it off later. ;-)

Feel free to comment on what's changed, what you like and what you don't like over the last year. I should do this again as an update.

CP