They beat me to it! Mapchannels created this very neat customizable mashup of Google Street View with Microsoft Bird’s Eye, with all the elements I was muttering about, to myself. As a matter of fact, Mapchannels has several other nice tools which you can customize and put on your website. So who are they? Apparently, a very low profile organization, no name or location to be discovered, a mystery. So in case you read this, Mapchannels, THANK YOU! The application is embedded in my page “Amsterdam Map“, with a starting point near the Dam. You can type in any other location in the world where Street View exists, and enjoy the slick results.
Archive for the 'Microsoft Virtual Earth' Category
To compare the coverage offered by these two Web online mapping tools, a programmer, Ryan Jonasson, in South Dakota has come up with a “side-by-side” viewer. While Microsoft’s VE is really a cross between Google Maps and Google Earth (right now), it lacks detailed “aerial” views outside of the US, UK and France. (The default on this viewer is “aerial”, so be sure to change to “road” if you zoom in to a European city.)
Coverage is changing every time the earth turns. Google Lat Long announced (Sept 15) detailed maps of 54 more countries, from Aruba, to Iran and Iraq, to Yemen.
Here’s a list of the new Google countries: Continue reading ‘Microsoft VE vs. Google Maps’
James Fee wrote about the Sept 13 Microsoft announcement that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has licensed Microsoft Virtual Earth (for one year, with possible extension to two) for “mission critical” applications. According to an article in Federal Computer Week (FCW), the partnership between Microsoft and ESRI contributed to the selection, as the EPA can leverage its existing ESRI GIS resources.
Why not Google Earth? According to a Bloomberg interview with EPA’s Pat Garvey, the fact that GE requires that the user download an application, whereas VE is all browser based was a key factor.
An alternative path to putting “real GIS” on the web with MS Virtual Earth (and ESRI’s geodatabase ArcSDE) is using ISC’s MapDotNet Server. This product competes with ArcGIS Server, and according to the ISC blog they were “kicked out” of the ESRI partner program last spring.
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