Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Windows Live Local, using Virtual Earth (Beta) went live today!

 

For those of you who live in San Francisco, Los Angeles or Las Vegas, open up the below Local Live link and check out the “birds eye” view on the left side menu.  Simply type in an address in the “where” query box or a point of interest in the “what” query box.  Keep in mind this is still a beta product, but it is the first of many features to come as we drive local search functionality by leveraging our mapping platform for visualization. 

 

ATTENTION: 

This oblique (45 degree) imagery is exclusive to Microsoft – you won’t see this anywhere else!  Over time, we will add many more additional cities to this list.

 

 

Note to my customers:  This is our consumer offering, but many of our enterprise customers are already taking advantage of our Virtual Earth Developer API as well.  Needless to say, there is tremendous value in many verticals (Real Estate, Hospitality, Retail, to name a few).

 

Our enterprise offering today is still Microsoft MapPoint 2004 and the MapPoint Web Service, but in 2006 look for a combination of these features that offers our enterprise customers a creative, inexpensive, and secure way to expand their business value, through BI and on-line market extensibility.

 

We are seeing a tremendous interest in Business Intelligence visualization, leveraging our MapPoint tool set and our partner solution layer.  The integration of MapPoint with the Business Score Card creates a BI solution that no one else in the industry can provide.  Consider a solution in the following areas:  Fleet Management, Asset Management, Sales/Territory Analysis, Location Services, and the traditional Store/Branch/ATM/… Locator Services.

A couple of news/blog highlights from today:
 

Inquirer:  Microsoft pressures Google from the sky
SOFTWARE FIRM Microsoft is offering close-up views of cities as an attempt to steer folk away from the goodie two shoes who run Google. …
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28213

 

One of the very first blog posts:
http://www.decheung.com/2005/12/birds_eye_view.html