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.

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 th

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 - Technorati tags: Ditu, Olympics, China Maps