Webworld Technologies

Went to a good track today at the SharePoint 2009 Conference with Chris Pendleton, the Tech Evangelist for Bing Maps, and author of the Bing Maps Blog.  His post rounded out some other good solutions I saw today from other vendors – most notably of which was IDV Solutions.

Chris started off with some fun facts on Bing Maps – ones I didn’t know, like:

• Bing maps is 2 petabytes of tile & vector data.  I thought that was impressive – especially since the first satellite imaging product I ever saw (waaaay before Google Maps) was the old Microsoft Terraserver demo, which originally (back in 1998) showed that you could actually store a whopping FULL TERABYTE in the “new SQL server 7 beta”.  Now, Bing Maps is over 2 thousand times larger. 
• 3D cities are created by flyovers & lidar – totally created from software.  Nearly zero of the 3D buildings you see in Bing Maps were created with 3Dvia – most were created by aircraft flying over the cities, doing 3D lidar imaging of the city, and then making models of that which textures can be draped over.

  Also, related to that, I asked Chris afterwards how to get 3D buildings in Washington, D.C. Metro, as they’re conspicuously missing.  The answer there is that apparently the government does not want detailed 3D models of the capitol area created.  (??) So, the 3D data is created, and is also available from 3rd-party ISV’s, but will not be posted on the public Bing Maps site.

  So, that’s your answer why DC is flat, when even places like Nashville are fully-rendered in 3D.
   

• Microsoft does Parcel-centroid geocoding – able to put a pushpin in the middle of a land parcel

Now, in terms of integrating this with SharePoint data – I talked with some folks at IDV Solutions at the expo, who had the sexiest SharePoint visualization product.  Here’s a video of that here:

1. Manfred Suendorf says:

   January 6, 2010 at 10:01 am

   We are proud to present our new MapPoint® 2010 – Business Suite and the first complete Bird´s Eye Atlas of Europe and North America.
   We scanned with an accuracy of 250 meter.
   Just have a look: http://www.mappoint2010.info
   If you are interested, let us know
   Kind regard manfred
2. @WebworldTech says:

   January 6, 2010 at 11:48 am

   Thanks Manfred – we’re developing solutions based on the newest iteration of Bing Maps, such as this solution made for Arlington County:

   http://www.webworldtech.com/casestudy-arlington-county-geospatial-solution

   But we’ll let you know if we come across any MapPoint solutions!