In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference, Microsoft shared their plans regarding Bing's "Read/Write World", presented by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

Here's what it is: "The Read/Write World is a project to index, unify, and connect of the world’s geo-linked media. Consisting of a cloud-based geo-indexing, matching and processing services, the scenarios it will enable include:

• Seeing your photos automatically connected to others.
• Being able to simply create immersive experiences from your own and others’ photos, videos,  panoramas, and models
• “Fixing” the world, when the official imagery of your street is out of date.
• Visually mapping your business, your rental apartment, or your local strip mall, and allowing everyone to explore it.
• Understanding the emergent information from the density and tagging of Geo-media"

There's plenty of screenshots in the entry if you want to see what it looks like. The announcement also mentions RML, "the new Reality Markup Language", I admit I never heard of it before. Also unclear is exactly what they mean when they mention open source in this sentence: "Microsoft will provide open source viewing code and cloud-based services to power the Read/Write World [...]".

If the two recent Bing Maps announcements (here and here) left you underwhelmed, fear not. There is a new video up from cnet which has Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Microsoft's architect of Bing Maps and Bing Mobile, giving a rundown on some of the new mapping features they are releasing (starting with the iPhone). Check it out as it's pretty interesting and innovative stuff coming from Microsoft.

From an engadget story : "Microsoft's already added a Taxi Fare Calculator to Bing Maps to help keep your cabbie in check, and it's now actually enlisted the help of some 33,000 Beijing cab drivers in an effort to further improve driving directions. More specifically, it's relying on GPS data collected from the cab drivers' cars over a period of three months, which has since been funneled into a system called T-Drive created by a team at Microsoft Research Asia."

*update : More details have been posted on wired courtesy of the GIS Lounge

The Bing maps blog has a couple of major news items up on their blog today. The first being their enhancements to their birds eye view technology. Primarily updating it so that it's available without resorting to the use of Silverlight. Perhaps this has something to do with Microsoft "shifting their strategy" on Silverlight and focusing more on HTML 5. Looks like the days of Silverlight are numbered. Secondly, Bing Maps 3D will no longer be supported. Not that it has been supported much for the past year or two. Which explains why the Google Earth plugin has leapfrogged their viewer in every which way possible. This is just them officially saying that they will be dropping support for it. So read the articles if you want more details.