The eCityGov Alliance is a regional inter-local agency located in the Puget Sound region of Washington State that provides Internet-based services and information to business and local residents. eCityGov develops cross-boundary, multi-functional Web sites where users can find online access to a suite of services including permitting, commercial property information, recreation resources, shared vendor rosters, and more. To make its recreation and parks Web site especially user-friendly, the Alliance wanted to add an interactive mapping and search feature. eCityGov used Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ to build an application where users can search, locate, and visualize regional parks and recreational resources. With Virtual Earth, eCityGov delivered a rich user experience, reduced the time and cost of implementation, and freed limited technology resources to focus on higher-value tasks.

Read full case study here.

For more than a year I have been blogging on the Virtual Earth platform and sharing the different and clever ways the Public Sector customers are applying it for business intelligence applications. During this time, I have also occasionally shared my thoughts about ways that Virtual Earth (VE3D especially) could be used for law enforcement and intelligence. As the saying goes, you are only limited by your imagination.

Well the writers of the popular television show CSI: New York are not lacking in imagination. Apparently they have included Virtual Earth in some recent episodes but none so much as last night's episode in which our hero's use Virtual Earth to track a killer.

Virtual Earth appears as early as as early as 26:32 but the best footage comes around 36:40 when Virtual Earth is used to locate a firehouse first through satellite imagery on a desktop machine, and then zooming in on the building in Virtual Earth 3D on a big screen (where Virtual Earth belongs!). I love the transition from the 3D model to the actual building because it illustrates the photo-realistic and accurate nature of the Virtual Earth 3D models that I have been preaching about all this time.

You can see the episode here. You can single-click the slider bar under the screen to jump ahead but note that you’ll watch a commercial each time you do.

It is SO worth it!  Thanks to Roger Mall of the Virtual Earth team for arranging and sharing this.

I only recently blogged on this but want to just quickly remind everyone to register for TOMORROW'S webinar:

Microsoft Virtual Earth partner IDV Solutions is offering free 2 day training for customers interested in building mapping applications using the Virtual Earth platform and IDV's Visual Fusion offering. The offer provides personal training for up to 6 attendees at IDV's office and enables attendees who successfully complete the training to build and maintain an application within just a few hours.

The offer, valued at $12,500, will be fully explained in a webinar that IDV will host May 14, 2008, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM ((GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)). The webinar will also provide participants with a better understanding of the applicability of Virtual Earth and Visual Fusion to address public sector customer's needs for enhanced clarity and collaboration around critical business data.

The registration for the webinar can found on IDV's web site here: http://www.idvsolutions.com/federaloffer2008.aspx

This aerial view in the Boulder, CO area was brought to my attention. Clearly this property is owned by an extremely intelligent person who recognizes advanced technology when they see it.

I would be even more impressed if it were the Virtual Earth logo!

Frequently we get requests from customers interested in learning more about how to actually code with our Virtual Earth application program interface (API). As simple as we try to make developing solutions with Microsoft Virtual Earth, having someone show you how to do it always makes good sense. One of our peers on the DPE team in Microsoft Public Sector, Marc Schweigert, hosted a webcast a while back during which he walked the audience through developing applications using the Virtual Earth API.  Here is the session description and you can also watch the webcast that has been recorded in Microsoft Events:

The Virtual Earth Platform is an integrated set of services that combines unique  imagery with best-of-breed mapping, location and search functionality. It enables governments to deliver innovative solutions and breakthrough customer experiences. With the Virtual Earth platform, organizations can create an immersive experience that enables consumers to easily discover, search, and visualize business location data and locally relevant information. Take your websites and applications to the next level by integrating the Virtual Earth Platform to deliver the highly visual and locally relevant information consumers care about most.

I am occasionally receiving messages from readers whose communications preferences are not set to allow me to reply. I receive the following error:

If you have left a message and have not heard back, please check your settings to ensure that you are allowing receipt of messages or post your question as a comment here on the blog and I will reply.

The Microsoft Virtual Earth product team has added another 22 TB of data to the Virtual Earth platform and published to the Live Search Maps site. Highlights in this release include medium resolution imagery of France, additional UltraCam aerial views in Japan (as well as in North America), Bird’s Eye imagery in Canada and Australia, more GeoEye 1 meter satellite imagery in India, and several areas of the US updated with 0.5m aerial imagery.

Here's the list:

15 cm Aerial Orthophoto Views

• Pueblo, CO
• Wilmington, DE
• St. Joseph, MO
• Graceland, TN
• Memphis, TN
• Mesquite, TX
• Burlington, VT
• Yokohama, Japan
• Kawasaki, Japan
• Setagaya, Japan
• Halton/Toronto, Ontario
• Hamilton, Canada
• PhnomPenh, Cambodia
• Reykavik, Iceland
  

.5m Aerial Orthophoto Views

• Albuquerque/Santa Fe, NM
• Augusta, GA
• Charlotte, NC
• Columbia, SC
• El Paso, TX
• Florida Southwest Coast, FL
• Ocala-Gainesville, FL
• Gulfport, MS
• Knoxville, TN
• Myrtle Beach, SC
• Nashville, TN
• OklahomaCity, OK
• Panama City, FL
• Pensacola, FL
• San Francisco, CA
• St Cloud, MN
• Tampa Bay, FL

2.5m Aerial Orthophoto Views
          

• Mainland France, plus Corsica
• Guadeloupe
• Saint Barthelemy
• Martinique
• French Guiana (coastline and most borders)
• Reunion
• Saint Pierre et Miquelon

Bird's Eye Views (North America)  
  

• Pickens County, AL
• Smith Co, MS
• Lancaster Metro, PA
• Suburban St. Louis, MO
• Tate Co, MS
• Areas NW of Birmingham, AL
• Olmstead Co, MN
• Tunica Co, MS
• Tallahatchie Co, MS
• Yalobusha Co, MS
• Lawrence Co, PA
• Hinds Co, MS
• Mississippi Metro
• Douglas Co, KS
• Eau Claire, WI
• Black Hawk Co, IA
• Minnehaha Co, SD
• Pasco Co, FL
• Pitt Co, NC
• Johnson Co, IA
• Charlotte Co, FL
• Boulder, CO
• Pueblo, CO
• Yellowstone Co, MT
• Woodbury Co, IA
• Pennington Co, SD
• Merrimack Co, NH
• Fulton Co, GA

Bird's Eye Views (Canada)

• Calgary, Alberta
• Toronto, Ontario
• Toronto, Ontario
• Montreal, Quebec
• Victoria, BC
• Edmonton, Alberta
• Vancouver, BC

Bird's Eye Views (Australia)
            

• Gold Coast, Australia
• Sydney, Australia
• Hobart, Australia
• Wollongong, Australia

Bird's Eye Views (Europe)

• Aberdeen, UK
• Edinburgh, UK
• Dunfermline, UK
• Cumbernauld, UK
• Falkirk, UK
• East Kilbride, UK
• Dundee, UK
• Crawley, UK
• Glasgow, UK
• Liverpool, UK
• Las Palmas, Spain
• Telde, Spain
• Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
• Den Helder, Netherlands
• Ruhrgebiet Region, Germany
• Ruhrgebiet Region, Germany
• London, UK (reflights)
• Ruhrgebiet Region, Germany
• Berlin, Germany
• Agrinion, Greece
• Chalkida, Greece
• Chania, Greece
• Drama, Greece
• Ioannina, Greece
• Kalamata, Greece
• Iraklion, Greece
• Katerini, Greece
• Kavala, Greece
• Lamia, Greece
• Larnia, Greece
• Serres, Greece
• Trikala, Greece
• Patra, Greece
• Volos, Greece

GeoEye Satellite Orthophoto Views
              

• Baker_Island, USA
• The Alhambra in Grenada, Spain
• Ahmadabad, India
• Pune, India
• Bhopal, India
• Timbuktu, Mali
• Bhudaneswar, India
• Indore, India
• Patna, India
• Nagpur, India
• Bangalore, India
• Calcutta, India
• New_Delhi, India
• Bombay, India
• Hyderabad, India
• Jaipur, India
• Kanpur, India
• Madras, India

Microsoft Virtual Earth partner IDV Solutions is offering free 2 day training for customers interested in building mapping applications using the Virtual Earth platform and IDV's Visual Fusion offering. The offer provides personal training for up to 6 attendees at IDV's office and enables attendees who successfully complete the training to build and maintain an application within just a few hours.

The offer, valued at $12,500, will be fully explained in a webinar that IDV will host May 14, 2008, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM ((GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)). The webinar will also provide participants with a better understanding of the applicability of Virtual Earth and Visual Fusion to address public sector customer's needs for enhanced clarity and collaboration around critical business data.

The registration for the webinar can found on IDV's web site here: http://www.idvsolutions.com/federaloffer2008.aspx

Here's a new Virtual Earth video that highlights what we have been calling the "version 2" enhanced 3D cities. Among other enhancements, these newest cities are denser (more buildings), have better, more detailed photo-realistic texturing, and feature trees.

The video also features some pretty cool Virtual Earth bird's eye imagery (oblique, 45 degree aerial views). Take a look:

 
Video: Microsoft Virtual Earth - Spring 2008 Release

As follow-up to last week's entry on the unveiling of Microsoft Boulder's 100% wind-powered data labs for powering the Virtual Earth 3D environment, here is a nice story run on Denver Channel 9 with some footage of the event, including some statements from Microsoft execs Debra Chrapaty and Erik Jorgensen.

It also stars Microsoft Boulder's Jim Curlander who, unfortunately, is incorrectly identified as John Curlander--general manager for the site--but does an outstanding job speaking to the event and the Virtual Earth 3D environment

With Earth Day just a week away, Microsoft unveiled its new wind-powered container-based data lab yesterday at its site in Boulder, Colorado. The containers house data processing servers used in the creation of the 3D city models featured in Virtual Earth online mapping platform.

Given the computationally intense nature of creating the 3D models, the storage requirements for the operation are staggering. The new lab servers each have 8 “cores”—CPUs essentially—totaling more than 5000 cores and supporting more than 10 petabytes of data. When factored in with lab servers located in the facility’s building--now also wind-powered--the total storage capacity supporting the Virtual Earth operation in Boulder is 15 petabytes. To put this into perspective, a typical consumer camera is around 5 megabytes. It would take three billion of these images to fill the 15 petabytes of storage: the equivalent of 10 photos for every person in the US.

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to environmental sustainability, the Boulder location is purchasing Wind generated power by Renewable Choice to power 100% of their operations. Microsoft currently uses many alternative forms of energy in their global operations including hydroelectricity and solar power, and and are pleased to add wind to our power mix.

Attending the unveiling along with the Boulder staff of roughly 88, were Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice-president of Microsoft Global Foundation Services;, Erik Jorgensen, general manager of Microsoft’s Live Search initiative; and Microsoft Virtual Earth executive leaders Stephen Lawler and John Curlander. Local media were also in attendance, covering this momentous occasion.

Below is a photo of the data labs. For photos and coverage of the event, see this story in today's Boulder Daily Camera.

"Gadget Guy" Steve Van Dinter from WISC TV 3 is keen on Virtual Earth, especially the 3D city models. A clever lad, Steve immediately recognizes the benefit of mapping driving directions in 3D.

My favorite quote: "As we move forward into the future, this is technology that no doubt will see being incorporated into many things."

I like him. And I couldn't be more pleased that it was a City Planner from Pittsburgh who enlightened him. Go public sector!

Check out this clip of Steve showing off the recently enhanced Las Vegas 3D city model in Live Search Maps.

Today the Virtual Earth team launched a new release of the Virtual Earth platform, chock full of enhancements.

Below is the complete list of improvements as provided by our ace marketing team. But I want to call attention to a couple of things that just really impressed me.

First, we have 4 amazing new and enhanced 3D cities: Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix. What makes these "new and improved"? Holy Toledo (Toledo not included) ... 10x the amount of buildings in each 3D city, 3D trees, super enhanced building textures, VASTLY improved color balancing and contrast, and more detailed terrain features. If you were already impressed by the Virtual Earth 3D models--and you should have been--wait until you see these. No ... don't wait ... check out the Virtual Earth 3D blog dedicated just to the Virtual Earth 3D work coming out of the Microsoft 3D Integration team in Boulder, CO and Graz, Austria. Truly unreal stuff.

Note that when you attempt to access the 3D mode you will likely be prompted to download the new Virtual Earth managed control software (5 MB plug-in) again to operate Virtual Earth in 3D. You want this! The new map control allows for smoother transitions between tile layers, and smoother layering of labels onto the map. I found this as cool as any of the enhancements.

And speaking of which ... the map control panel in the user interface has changed: "hybrid" mode is gone, thankfully. (What did that mean anyway?)  Now, if you want labels on top of your aerial imagery, whether in 2D or 3D mode, you click on "Labels". Genius. There is also now an option for Traffic you right in the panel.

Meanwhile we also launched Tokyo 3D. While this is not processed using the new engineering techniques that allow for the enhanced Virtual Earth cities described above, it is still really exciting because it is our first Asian Virtual Earth 3D city and it is HUGE: 12,791 buildings in Tokyo, but about 60,000 buildings in the Tokyo area including Saitama. (Compared to our 3D model of the New York City metro area which totaled 34,800 buildings.) Take a look:

And there is a lot more to this new release that I haven't even explored!

In this latest release, the Virtual Earth platform delivers on its promise to empower organizations with a new way to see their world and achieve their goals.

Remember that most of these new features and functionality can be seen free at our Live Search Maps consumer destination site.

Immersive Imagery
Virtual Earth is an industry leader in providing precise views of the world through bird’s eye¹ view and panning, and improved 3D model accuracy and resolution, among other features. Precise imagery creates immersive end-user experiences that bring location-based information to life.

• More Detailed 3D Experiences: With this latest release, the map detail for Las Vegas, NV; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX; and Denver, CO features improvements in 3D model accuracy and resolution detail to reveal more buildings, small terrain features, building textures, and trees that enhance overall realism. This enhanced 3D map detail will soon roll out to the more than 250 cities where 3D models are currently available.

• Tailored 3D Tours. Media producers can customize video output of 3D fly though tours in six resolutions, in 15 or 30 frames per second, and can add photos and hide or display pushpin icons.
  
• Bird’s Eye View in 3D. Users can easily toggle bird’s eye view on and off for a seamless end-user experience.
  
• Bird’s Eye Hybrid View. Customers can now select a new map style called Bird’s Eye Hybrid that adds street names to the bird’s eye maps to provide end users better visual context and orientation.

Enhanced Location Functionality
This latest release of Virtual Earth provides organizations with a host of new features that deliver directions—in more languages—to get users where they’re going faster. With enhanced tools that provide greater flexibility and control over the development of location solutions, organizations can continue to update and enhance their online experience to help them remain competitive and provide satisfying end-user experiences.

• New Walking Directions. When traveling on foot, users in North America and the European Union can now find the most direct route to walk to their destination, ignoring one-way streets, medians, and other detours that pertain to motor vehicles.
  
• New Traffic-based Routing. Want to take the frontage road and avoid the highway at rush hour? Users can now choose alternate routes based on current traffic flows to get where they’re going faster.
  
• New Reverse Geocoding. Users in the U.S. can now find the closest street address based only on latitude and longitude coordinates from a GPS or other geospatial device.
  
• Improved Localized Directions. Organizations can now provide users with localized driving or walking directions in 15 languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Italian, among others.
  
• New Locales. The Virtual Earth dashboard, or navcontrol, is localized to support languages including English for U.S.-based speakers, Japanese, Italian, Spanish for U.S.-based speakers, as well as French for both France and Canada-based speakers.

Enhanced Infrastructure
The Virtual Earth platform is designed for the enterprise user, from features to support. This 6.1 release enhances the platform infrastructure with new cross-browser support to reach more users. The Interactive SDK is available now to demonstrate the latest features and functionality.

• Safari Support. The new map control includes improved support for Apple Safari 2 and new support for Safari 3, enabling Mac users to enjoy many of the features of Virtual Earth that are available on Internet Explorer®.
  
• Improved Printing Support. Printing support for maps is enhanced to print the driving route in relation to the map. Printing support is also expanded for cross-browser support of Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2 for PC, and Safari 2 and 3 for Mac only.
  
• Updated Interactive SDK. Customers can now access the new Virtual Earth Interactive SDK for online viewing or via download, to demonstrate the new functionality of the Virtual Earth map control.

[1]Available in many metropolitan areas across the U.S. Licensing restrictions for government customers.

Among the many benefits of Virtual Earth as a development platform for mapping applications is that, as a Microsoft offering, it integrates easily with other Microsoft products that public customers already have investments in such as Dynamics, SQL Server, Sharepoint and even Office.

When combined with Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007, Virtual Earth provides a data visualization platform to monitor performance, helping public sector customers correlate traditionally disparate and unconnected data, leading to better, faster and more relevant decisions.

To illustrate this, the Microsoft public sector team has recently posted an insightful video.

From the blog of Microsoft partner IDV Solutions:

For all of you enterprise Microsoft developers, this Wednesday, April 9th, from 2-3:30 PM EDT, Microsoft is hosting a webcast from IDV's Scott Caulk, product manager for Visual Fusion. Rather than summarizing Scott's abstract, here it is:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 (MOSS) is rapidly approaching the 100 million licenses sold milestone and SharePoint consulting services are white hot.  IDV Solutions’ Visual Fusion software extends SharePoint to create a visual composite application platform, empowering users and the enterprise to consolidate data and services surfaced in SharePoint and then compose them in the context of location and time.  In short, Visual Fusion geospatially enables SharePoint.  This webcast will inform the Microsoft  developer community about the capabilities of Visual Fusion, the primacy of location and time in organizing information, and how to quickly create compelling visual composite applications.  An application will be created from the ground up, combining structured enterprise data (SharePoint Lists & Libraries, SQL Server stored procedures) with unstructured workgroup data (Excel files, KML files, and SHP files), cloud-based data (KML feeds, RSS feeds, and WMS feeds, Map Point Web services, Virtual Earth), and ad hoc contributions from the user (map annotation).  The audience will see how the combination of Visual Fusion and SharePoint results in a geospatial content management system, how portal services (Search, alerting, the business data catalog, etc.) can be leveraged to supercharge visual composite applications, and how an RIA front-end will engage, create buy-in, and facilitate collaboration among users.

Register here!

Ye faithful readers of the Virtual Earth for Public Sector blog will remember a couple of posts on Virtual Earth partner the Carbon Project and their ((Echo))MyPlace peer-to-peer technology for geo-social networking around Virtual Earth maps. Company founder Nuke Goldstein and CEO Jeff Harrison were recently interviewed for an article in Directions magazine that provides insight into the product, how it differs from other offerings, and its revenue models.

Take a look ... an informative and quick read.

Lafayette, Louisiana Consolidated Government, with a grant from Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA, has a public facing Louisiana Mapping Project web site showing citizens flood risk zones in particular regions.

Within only a couple of weeks, the initial phase of this public facing site has been upgraded to utilize Virtual Earth.

With this, they are seeing a considerable improvement in site performance.

Check it out for yourself. Here is the site not yet upgraded with Virtual Earth maps (have patience as the old maps load):

And here is the new site with Virtual Earth interactive maps. be sure to turn off and on the data layers and note how quickly they load.

Whenever I have the opportunity to bend the ear of public sector customers about the benefits of the Virtual Earth mapping platform over the competitor's offering, there are a few key points that I like to emphasize after talking about the great imagery, the accurate geocoding, and the web service model (with the option of the Virtual Earth Appliance for offline applications).

Those points are: Microsoft has a longstanding history of providing enterprise solutions; Microsoft has a vast developer community and a strong partner network, experienced in developing on Microsoft platforms and using Microsoft APIs; and being a Microsoft product, Virtual Earth integrates easily with other Microsoft products that public sector customers already have invested in, such as SQL, Office, and in particular, Sharepoint.

To underscore the latter of these two points, Ian Clemens--of Microsoft partner IDV Solutions--has blogged on a capability of their Visual Fusion Server to quickly plot Excel data onto a Virtual Earth map. Because the data is passed from Excel to Sharepoint, you can set update alerts on the contents, set document workflows, assign permissions, and search the content within the SharePoint environment. As a 'nicety' (a rather cool one, I might add), Visual Fusion Server allows you to assign symbology from a built-in library to differentiate and identify the data types you are layering on the Virtual Earth map.

Best of all ... because the data is coming from a Sharepoint portal, your Excel spreadsheet just went from a static tabular list to a dynamic linked source for your Virtual Earth map data.

I think I am going to cry.  :-)

Ian's blog entry takes you through the process step-by-step. A great read.

Just as a follow-up to my last post on the Virtual Miami project, I want to quickly draw attention to the IS Consulting solution offering behind the Miami project.

ISC calls the offering "Virtual City" but I like to think of it as City In A Box. The solution serves as a quick start platform, of sorts, for developers within State and Local agencies to quickly setup portals similar to the Miami and Old Bridge New Jersey (previously blogged) portals, leveraging code that ISC has already created and their MapDotNet Server technology to integrate GIS data on the Virtual Earth mapping platform. ISC will host the portal, deploy at your site, or deliver on a CD.

Take a look at their Virtual City web page for more information.

Some time ago I blogged on an application that Microsoft partner IS Consulting was working on with the City of Miami for their MiamiGov Virtual Earth based web portal. At that time, the application had been reported on by the Miami Herald but was not yet live so I could not point you to the web site.

This week, Miami released the site which utilizes ISC's MapDotNet Server--a .Net spatial application development platform--to integrate the City's GIS data with the Virtual Earth interactive maps. The enhanced MiamiGov site now allows city personnel and constituents to visualize and thus gain better understanding of community information in the areas of zoning and property, public safety and response, and urban planning. The site takes advantage of Microsoft's photorealistic, geospecific and highly accurate Miami City 3D model to provide first responders with unobstructed views of emergency sites before arriving on scene, and citizens and visitors with the ability to explore the City virtually before leaving home or the hotel room.

Take a look at this page on the City web site for links to the different Virtual Earth applications as well as a video that features representatives from the City and IS Consulting explaining in their own words the benefits of Virtual Earth for these applications.