Kurt Shintaku's Blog

<taken from the maps.live.com blog>

The first 50% is in and the next great iteration of http://maps.live.com is now live for our customers!  Awesome work everyone!! 

What started life as a minor update between Gemini and Helios has turned into a significant upgrade.  Even while we were pushing to get Gemini QFE 1 out the door and struggling with the ever-changing demands of the “front door”, we made some significant improvements that people are really going to love.  If you’ve been heads-down and haven’t had the opportunity to poke around the product a bit and check out some of the great new work we’ve done, I think you’ll be impressed by what we accomplished in just a few short months.  Here are just a few examples:

– 3D : We’ve improved world realism by ‘densifying’ city data with much richer textures and 3D trees.
try: Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Dallas

– App: We now support Safari 3 and IE 8 (try using Google Maps in IE 8 native mode).

– Collections: Use MSR’s MapCruncher technology to take your own personal map and overlay it anywhere on earth, then upload it to the collections database to share with the world through search.
try: Crunch sample including Seattle Transit

– Directions: Traffic based routing now uses MSR’s ClearFlow technology to predict side street traffic based on what is happening in the live feed we get from traffic.com.
try: SeaTac to UW

– Geocoding: With reverse geocoding support it is now easy to get an address from anywhere on the map, Just right-click on a building in the map and choose 1-click directions or drive to… and you’ll see a real address as the end point.

– Platform: We have JavaScript API support for all our new features, including Safari 3 and IE 8 compatibility.

– Search: We now include new review data from Zagat and Yelp, two of the best sources for restaurant review information, directly in our reviews listing. 
try: Reviews of Papa John’s in Redmond

The full feature list is at the bottom of this mail, and I just want to make it clear that our achievement here would not have been possible without your help.  Each and every one of you deserve a huge THANK YOU for keeping http://maps.live.com the absolute best location and directions service on the Internet!