Blog List

This week I caught up with Laura Diaz from NAVTEQ to chat about how Bing Maps developers can win their share of US 10 million dollars in the global LBS Challenge. This is the first year that web based applications can be submitted and with Microsoft’s Bing Maps use of NAVTEQ data the ideal platform to build your entry is clear.

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You can download the mp3 here.

“First launched in 2003, the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is focused on driving the development and visibility of innovative location-based solutions (LBS) for wireless devices. The Global LBS Challenge has become the premier event in the wireless industry and a global symbol of LBS innovation and opportunity. From business applications to sports, travel and security, integrating the accuracy and richness of NAVTEQ digital map data facilitates the discovery of the next wave of LBS using dynamic positioning technology.”

Highlights:

$10,000,000 in prizes consists of cash and data licenses. Real opportunity to meet some of the top companies in this field. Competition is broken into regions, must register soon, North America closes 20th November! Web applications can simple be submitted as a working URL Mobile applications making it to the next round will get a sponsored device if they choose that device in their entry. Open to non-commercial applications With the release of the new Bing Maps Silverlight control will we see some very cool entries?  

For more information visit the competition homepage...

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Here at Tech Ed Australia 2009 we are presenting on the Bing Maps Silverlight control, it’s session WEB302. If you’re in the crowd or simply reading this after the event you can follow along with our demos here.



http://about.soulsolutions.com.au/

First up is a little visualisation of where we work and play. This data is hard coded into the application and took less then an hour to put together. The minimap, custom navigation and custom image pin are part of the open source DeepEarth project.

 



http://bingmapsupdates.cloudapp.net/

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Sarah Vaughan, the Windows 7 Group Lead in Australia, today demonstrated our Silverlight 3 / Windows 7 Multi touch application in the keynote of the Australian Partner Conference.



The Silverlight application is built on top of Bing Maps and uses our open source controls called DeepEarth. This particular application allows you to annotate the map, drawing polygons and lines and adding points. All of this data can be captured and stored into a SQL 2008 database. We added a custom tile layer of the exhibition venue itself.

In order to support multi touch you need to be running Windows7 and have a multi touch enabled screen and drivers. HP, the hardware sponsors of the event supplied the nice screen Sarah is using and also lent us a TouchSmart Tx2 tablet for the development.



If you have such a device you can see the application here (works with just a mouse as well):

http://multitouch.soulsolutions.com.au/

The gestures are:

pinch zoom in / out 2 finger swipe left / right to show / hide the drawing panel 2 finger hold 1/2 sec for AerialwithLabels, 3 finger hold for road, 4 for plain aerial. Drag the map with one finger. One thing to note is that multi touch doesn’t currently work in full screen mode.

Commercially we are working with a Mining Company here...

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Just an update to the sessions we’re presenting and activities we’re involved in at Tech.Ed Australia this year on the Gold Coast.

WEB 302 - Bing your data to life, the Virtual Earth Silverlight control  Wed 9/9/2009 13:45-15:00 in Meeting Room 7 Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) provides a slick and powerful data visualisation engine for your spatial information. Join John O'Brien for a look at how the core control can be combined with other Silverlight components including DeepEarth and Photosynth to produce a rich and engaging interface. See how SQL Server 2008 spatial data can be rendered in real time and how this whole interface can be integrated into your Sharepoint site.

THG007 - 3 the New Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit for Social Websites Thu 10/9/2009 15:00-15:30 in Green Interactive Theatre

See how to add IM to a site with the Windows Live Messenger Library and UI Controls, and how to build new relationships around content with Messenger social capabilities. Also hear how top sites and marketers are using the social connections of Windows Live users to grow and build brand loyalty.

WIT Women in IT Wed 9/9/2009 12:45-13:45

Hosted by Catherine Eibner, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Dynamics, Women in IT is about growing strong female leaders in the IT industry. Leading women in IT and industry experts will lead discussions...

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We the release of Silverlight3 I thought I would share this skunk works project I have been working on. We have the Photosynth Silverlight control running inside our Silverlight3 application. We pull all the geo-referenced synths and display them on a Bing Maps CTP Silverlight control. You will see two types of icons, the big ones are clusters with many synth, zoom in till you get a smaller leaf, click on this to load the synth using some Silverlight3 magic.

http://photosynth.soulsolutions.com.au/

So go and explore all the public synths throughout the world! My favourites are:

• Pyramids at Giza
• Machu Pichu Peru
• London Eye
• Mount Rushmore
• Statue of Liberty

Let me know what you think of the more integrated experience and how you think Photosynth should be better integrated spatially.

What are your favourite locations?

I’m pleased to announced my project has launched for the Azure #newcloudapp international competition. Its called Traffic in the Cloud and provides a rich interactive location twist on public webcams throughout the world.



So what makes this new and worth checking out? Well apart from the slick DeepZoom Silverlight control  (you need another reason?) here is why:

Give context to the camera images, browse by location and see what is happening live around the world. Sit back and enjoy a tour around the world. An Azure worker process caches 10 frames of each camera so you can now add some motion to your view even if the source website doesn’t. Those frames are made into a sprite as recommended by Jose Farjardo which means CPU usage and scalability rocks You can add your own cameras by signing in with a LiveID and filling out a simple form (Approval is needed before it goes live) All the controls used are available open source from the DeepEarth project on Codeplex....

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I always struggle to find the full list of SQL 2008 Spatial methods for Geography when I need them so this is really just a helper post so I can find them again later but maybe it will help you also. Since they are case sensitive and don’t have intelisence I can never remember the syntax.

STArea STAsBinary STAsText STBuffer STDifference STDimension STDisjoint STDistance STEndpoint STEquals STGeometryN STGeometryType STIntersection STIntersects STIsClosed STIsEmpty STLength STNumGeometries...

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I noticed my old code samples around the place are a little outdated so I created this little sample based off the Bing Maps iSDK today. This is a little helper function that calculates 360 points around the location provided at the given radius in KM. The co-ordinates are quite accurate and you will notice the effects of adding a circle at different Latitudes on the Mercator map.





Full source:

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> html> head> title>Circle Example Bing Mapstitle> meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2">script> script type="text/javascript"> var map = null; var pinid = 0; function GetMap() { map = new VEMap('myMap'); map.LoadMap(); map.SetZoomLevel(2); } function AddPolyline() { var ll = map.GetCenter(); var shape = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Polyline, getCircle(ll, 100)); shape.SetTitle('My circle'); shape.SetDescription('This is shape number ' + pinid); pinid++; map.AddShape(shape);...

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We were at the Bing Maps roadshow in both Brisbane and Sydney, 10 and 12 June. I’ve finally gotten around to posting a few of the pictures I took from the day in Brisbane.  This year the sessions were broken in to customer and partner focus.

First up we had Peter Ulm, the ANZ Region Business Development Manager for Bing Maps for Enterprise, to do a bit of an intro and covered all the licensing details.



Then Chris Pendleton handled the technical stuff. Chris is a Bing Maps Technical Evangelist from the US.  He came all the way here to do the roadshow and a session at Remix.



And finally John talked about our experience as a Bing Maps Partner.



 

Technorati Tags: Bing Maps,Roadshow,Peter Ulm,Chris Pendleton

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It is actually very easy to display gigabytes of custom imagery on Bing Maps with fantastic results, the trick is to know what tools to use. Read on for a streamlined process for the common geo image formats using Global Mapper, SpaceBlock, Windows Azure and a few helpful tips along the way.



At Bing Map’s core is the ability to render really large images in your browser. Both the AJAX, Silverlight and Mobile versions all use a concept of a tile pyramid to make this possible and effective over the web, you can read more about the tile system in great detail here. Today we are going to look at a process I use to process custom imagery to overlay Bing maps.



In the GIS field these custom images are called raster images and come in various file formats like...

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