When the Live Spaces What’s New feed launched last October there were 6 different types of notification prevalent. They were:

We've just launched the new Live Search Maps India site and for a v1 it is SUPER robust. Check out this list of features:

Street Maps for 9 important Indian cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur and National Road Network of India with roughly 20,000 cities/towns/major localities (as points on the map). Political Map of India with important geographical features that includes national roads connecting around 20,000 Indian cities are on the offer. Highlight is the detailed maps for 9 important Indian cities as mentioned earlier. Within these 9 cities, important places likes monuments, restaurants, hotels are also presented as icons in the maps. Maps of supported cities has been stitched with the national road visually and navigationally.

Location Search – Global (one need not type the city name), context-aware (i.e. ranking of results considers the map view), error-tolerant (corrects the typos, expands the important abbreviations) and flexible solution to find complete or partial address, roads, localities, landmarks and places of general interest.

One can search for geographical things like address, roads, localities, landmarks and places of general interest like monuments, restaurants, hotels etc. for the 9 supported cities. Apart from this one can search for important geographical features and around 20,000 cities/major localities in India. However details for these cities are at much lower level. If an address can only be partly searched, it will drop the unmatched part and return the part result. Search is typo-resistant and tries to expand/abbreviate roads and locality wherever possible.

“Blr” will take you to the city of Bangalore. Short city names like Blr, Hyd etc. are supported

While you are in Bangalore (i.e. the map area of the browser is completely filled by the map of Bangalore), “MG Road” will show the MG road on the map of Bangalore and other MG Road (s) in India as suggestions. Location Search is context aware.

“Indira Naga” will result in suggestions for Indiranagar, Bangalore (fuzzy match) and one can click to go to there.

While you are in Hyderabad, “Bangalore Golf Course” will result in other golf courses as suggestions with the pushpin on the “Bangalore Golf Course, Bangalore” at their exact position on the map. 

“Airport, Delhi” will place the pushpin on the “Indira Gandhi International Airport, Gurgaon Road, New Delhi, Delhi” at their exact position on the map. 

Address “#643, Janu's Residency, CMH Road, 100 ft road, blr” will match to  “Chinmaya Mission Hospital Road, 100 Feet Road, Indiranagar, Bangalore, Karnataka, India”  as a suggestion. It dropped the part of address that it did not understand, expanded the acronyms and found the required road intersection.

While you are in Bangalore, “Begumpet” will result in Begumpet, Hyd. One need not type the city name while searching for localities.

Business Listing (Yellow Pages) Search - This allows us to find businesses listed with us. Click Business tab and specify what (e.g. “Petrol Pump” in first box) and where (e.g. “Indira Nagar” in second box) to get the business listings sorted according to distance from the location of search (i.e. Indira Nagar, Bangalore)

Click the Business tab. Under this one can find businesses by specifying either the name of the business or the category in first text box and address, locality, road or city in second text box. Search will return all business entities ranked/sorted according to the distance from the initial search location. The location of these results on the map (referred to as Geocode) are approximate and we are working on improving the same.

“Petrol Pump” (first text box), “Indira nagar” (second text box)  will result in all business entities along with their address, phone number (wherever applicable) etc. ranked/sorted according to the distance from the initial search location (i.e. Petrol Pumps near to Indira Nagar, Bangalore will be shown first and so on).

“Indian Oil” (first text box), “Indira nagar” (second text box) will result in all Indian Oil petrol pumps in Bangalore that are listed with us.

Routing/Driving Directions

• Intra-city visual driving directions
• Intercity integrated routing (detailed driving directions inside the cities having Street Maps and normal driving directions on the National map)
• One-click driving directions

Under this, one can route from a given source to a destination. Source and destination can be specified in multiple ways – by right clicking on the map, or by hovering over the search result icon displayed on the map or by hovering over the pushpins in the collections or by clicking directions link from menu and typing in the required addresses/locality/places/road. Source and destination can be any city/locality/place/landmark in India within 15KM of distance from any road. Clicking Reverse link at the bottom will swap the start and end point and will compute the route. Selecting Shortest Distance radio button will compute the routes for the shortest distance between the two points.

While you are in Hyderabad, From “CMH Road” To “Brigade Road” will result in visual + textual driving directions from “Brigade Road, Bangalore” to “CMH Road, Bangalore”.

While you are in Hyderabad, From “CMH Road, 100 Feet Road” To “Mysore” will result in driving direction from “intersection of CMH Road, Bangalore and 100 Feet Road, Bangalore” to “Mysore” with detailed driving directions within the city of Bangalore (for which we have Street Maps).

Share - User can share (by selecting “Send in e-mail” from “Share” Menu) his various search results, driving directions, collections etc. over email.

Print - User can take print out of the maps, driving directions, search results.

Collections - One can create collections of pushpins, custom drawings on the maps, routing etc. and save it against a Windows Live ID for viewing later or sharing it with others.

Namaste.

CP

For those of you who follow the imagery releases, there was no release for August. September, however, is now live and contains the following 46TB of imagery and vector updates.

Orthos

• Yakima, WA
• Springfield, MO
• Spokane, WA
• Portland, ME
• Grand Rapids, MI
• Billings, MT
• Minneapolis, MN (UltraCam Refresh)
• Seattle, WA (UltraCam Refresh)
• Las Vegas, NV (UltraCam Refresh)
• Phoenix, AZ (UltraCam Refresh)
• Tampa, Fl (UltraCam Refresh)

Vector

• Vector overlays for Navteq and MDS data sources for orthos and Bird's Eye
• All mobile tiles
• New British Isles Map style

3D

• Tampa, FL

CP

Just last week I blogged on the recent launch of Virginia DoT applications using Virtual Earth. At that time, I reminded you about other DoT sites using Virtual Earth including the Houston and El Paso sites down in Texas. I have just learned that four new Texas Department of Transportation Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) sites have been launched!

Take a look!

Texas Department of Transportation Intelligent Transportation System sites:
All of these sites provide real-time traffic cam views and some include road signs. The cameras are used strictly to monitor the traffic and weather conditions of the Panhandle roads. The video is not recorded, nor is it used by any agency to track or record any persons or activities.

Amarillo

Wichita Falls

A closer look at that road sign reveals that Texas Law Enforcement is looking out for its citizens. Of course, had this been a construction or travel advisory, this might have saved a traveler time behind the wheel by knowing to avoid this location.

Laredo

Note that these sites provide the ability to view the Virtual Earth maps in road map or aerial view modes.

Lubbock

I love this momentum we are seeing with DoT agencies using Virtual Earth and I am especially pleased to see the State of Texas adopting Virtual Earth so broadly.

As it turns out, Sam Houston was dead on when he said "Texas will again lift it's head and stand among the nations."

Indeed, Sam!

Last week I worked the GIS in the Rockies show in Loveland, Colorado. I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet with representatives from local agencies of my home State and show them how Virtual Earth could augment their business intelligence applications and citizen services web sites. Steve Milroy, also from the Virtual Earth team, presented to a full house, doing a technical deep dive and showing how Virtual Earth brings GIS data (including ESRI ArcGIS data) to life through its powerful visualization capabilities. I also drew a sizeable crowd during my Vendor Showcase presentation (the best draw at the show, I am told), demonstrating Virtual Earth in action through our Virtual Earth powered Live Search Maps consumer destination site.

Also present at the event was the Geospatial team from Idea Integration, Microsoft 2008 Partner of the Year, who provides consulting services including development of GIS solutions with Virtual Earth as the visualization engine. Despite the ease of developing Virtual Earth based data visualization applications, many small local governments do not have internal resources to do their own development. These customers turn to Microsoft partners like Idea Integration that are experienced in building applications using Microsoft Application Program Interfaces (APIs). Idea was also very helpful to me in manning the Virtual Earth booth and grabbed this snapshot of me helping customers. Thanks team!

When I am at these events, I often get the opportunity to learn about new and different applications being developed on the Virtual Earth platform. While at GIS in the Rockies I was approached by Dave Bouwman of Data Transfer Solutions (DTS) based in Fort Collins, CO. Dave shared a couple of applications that his organization has developed including the below Texas Forest Service portal. This site was created by DTS as a quick demo illustrating how GIS data layers can be integrated into the Virtual Earth environment. The user interface components (the menus, sliders, this tab etc) are all created using their DojoToolkit, an open-source javascript framework that allows developers to quickly create robust windows-style user interfaces in standard web pages. The GIS data layers are integrated via a tile service, which utilizes ESRI ArcGIS Server to render the images. The tiles are dynamically cached so the performance of the site continually improves. The fire occurrence point locations are pulled directly from a tabular data source, run through a clustering algorithm, and sent to the browser via Ajax.

The screenshot speaks to the features and functionality of the site, allowing you to turn on and off data layers through the layer control in the left panel. Love the sliders that allow to control the opacity of the raster data layers.

DTS has other Virtual Earth demos that can be found on their DojoToolkit demo site.