Was a little busy last week at the Microsoft CIO Summit and did not have time to blog a whole lot so I am late in reporting on this month's imagery update. I am going to take the easy way out and direct you to Steve Lombardi's Virtual Earth/Live Maps blog entry for a list of new imagery in Virtual Earth.

I would like to take just a moment, however, and elaborate on the Portugal imagery added. In addition to the bird's eye oblique imagery that Steve's blog reports, we have also added a new digital elevation model (DEM) and new aerial ortho imagery (the straight down aerial shots) for the entire country. The DEM is 50 meter post resolution compared to the previous 90m resolution and the orthos are 1m resolution.

What is interesting about this DEM and ortho imagery is that it all came directly from the Portuguese government who wanted their country mapped quickly in Virtual Earth and worked with our Boulder Image Acquisition team to provide imagery they already owned. This is fairly unique as I am not aware of any other agreements between Microsoft and a State government to acquire existing data for an entire region to be published in Virtual Earth. This turned out to be a mutually gratifying arrangement for both the Portuguese government and the Microsoft Virtual Earth team and I think is a great precedent to open talks with other State departments for similar transactions.

If your government, within or outside the USA, is interested in discussing the addition of your archived imagery to Virtual Earth, you can contact our Virtual Earth Data Acquisition team by emailing: