Maporama picks Microsoft's Virtual Earth over Google
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(InfoWorld) - Maporama International, a French location services company, hasÂ partnered with MicrosoftÂ to use its Virtual Earth mapping and satellite imagery, the companies said on Thursday. Maporama's business is focused on location-based services, such as back-end Web server technology to incorporate various mapping features into Web sites, said Ludovic Broquereau, Maporama's vice president for corporate marketing. The company also provides services and creates software incorporating GPS (global position system) data, among other products. Maporama, a 45-person company founded in 2000, already works with about 30 different mapping providers, Broquereau said. Google's mapping and satellite products were also initially under consideration, but Broquereau said Microsoft's product road map is a better fit for Maporama's needs. Maporama was also attracted to Microsoft's oblique imagery, which is so far not available with Google, Broquereau said. Microsoft calls the feature "bird's-eye view," so buildings and landscapes can be viewed closer up at a 45-degree angle. Overall, negotiations with Microsoft were easier than with Google, and Maporama already uses Microsoft's products, Broquereau said. Virtual Earth will be integrated into Maporama's product line over the next few months, Broquereau said. One of Maporama's clients is Accor, the European hotel company. As an example, Broquereau said Virtual Earth satellite and oblique imagery could be woven into Accor's Web site as an attractive feature for the site's users. Maporama did not disclose the financial arrangement with Microsoft.
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GoogleÂ is acquiring Panoramio, a photo-sharing Web site based in Spain that lets people upload photos and identify where they were taken by placing them on Google Earth or Google Maps, where they can be viewed by the public.
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Google is acquiring Panoramio, a photo sharing site that lets user upload photos and identify where they were taken.
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Oracle is adding a visual component to one of its E-Business Suite applications to help service providers locate customers more quickly using Google Maps.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft thinks its Live Search can match GoogleÂ in some areas now, but the company has been theÂ underdog in searchÂ for so long it's not even trying to lure users away from its rival -- at least not yet. Showing off a dizzying array of tools to reporters and analysts at its Silicon Valley campus in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., Microsoft executives said several times that the company is focused on providing a better search experience for current users of Live Search, hoping toÂ get them to search there more often. The Redmond, Wash., company also wants to lure users of its MSN portal to more frequently use Live Search. They compared Live Search's results to those of Google in some cases and said customer research showed its user satisfaction catching up to Google, but didn't talk about grabbing market share. The numbers are damning: About 37 percent of Web searchers sometimes use Live Search, but only about 11 percent of all searches are done on the site, Microsoft said, citing independent statistics. The average user of Live Search does 15 searches on the site per month, while the comparable number for Google is 55. Microsoft runs behind YahooÂ and Google, and Derrick Connell, a general manager in product management at Microsoft, acknowledged that the search product was actually losing market share in the first four months of this year. But the company hopes to gain ground at least among its current base with the new capabilities. Over the past three years, Microsoft has quietly invested in basic things such as coverage, expanding its index to more than 20 billion Web documents, executives said. But it's more flashy additions in video, health, local search and maps that may help Live Search make an impression. The new video search interface, one of the features to be rolled out gradually to all visitors over the next week, lets users play a preview of each video on a results page just by putting the cursor over the image representing it. Using internally developed technology as it "crawls" a video Web site, Microsoft detects moments in a video that are likely to be highlights, said Mike Nichols, a group program manager in Live Search. Those parts are combined in a 30-second preview that searchers can watch to get an idea of what a longer video is like. Audio peaks, flashes of light and scene changes are among the elements Microsoft's automated system looks for. The previews are cached on Microsoft's own servers for quick playing, he said. Microsoft's new specialized health search engine, to be rolled out the following week, will divide results into separate columns for journal articles, Web results and sponsored results. To address consumer worries about privacy, all searches and results on the health site will be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). In local search, Microsoft is using its Virtual Earth tool for richer results. It can project aerial photographs of places on Virtual Earth's navigable three-dimensional maps of major cities, said General Manager Erik Jorgensen. A tool for users to show highlights of a trip, called Collections, will be enhanced so viewers can just click through the trips or passively watch them in a virtual video rather than looking around a map. The maker of a Collection will also be able to upload the virtual video to sites such as YouTube, he said. Local directions will also be enhanced. Rather than make users enter a starting point, Live Search will offer directions from all the major highways, from which users can choose. As an option, the local search engine will also be able to modify those directions in light of current traffic conditions. Local and mapping features will be rolled out by mid-October, according to the company. Microsoft has done a poor job selling its search offerings, and if it has matched Google on factors such as relevance, few people would believe that right now, said Gartner Inc. analyst Van Baker. The new video, health and local search features are impressive and Microsoft is doing the right thing by targeting current Live Search users and MSN portal visitors, he said. "They've got to make sure that [group] is happy first," Baker said. After that, it may be able to convince others that Live Search is worth a try.
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Google Earth &#038; Multimedia Featured Content Google has just announced that Google Earth will be integrating multimedia educational information overlays under the Featured Content for Google Earth program. One of the providers is Turn Here, an innovative travel video service which offers free short films on destination cities, restaurants and hotels. Users can access these informative overlays [...]
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Pennsylvania is to use mapping website Google Earth to promote state tourism, by enabling virtual Civil War trails.
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Microsoft said it had agreed to acquire MultiMap, an online map service based in London, in an attempt to compete more effectively with the search services of Google.
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By Jeff Smith  Terrific navigational device or over the edge?  That's a question many are asking about Google Inc.'s newest map feature, Street View, which offers panoramic images of Denver's downtown streets and those of four other cities.
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Microsoft has bought Caligari, a developer of 3D modeling software, in a move that could help enrich the graphics experience in Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping system.
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Microsoft has bought Caligari, a developer of 3D modeling software, in a move that could help enrich the graphics experience in Microsoft&#39;s Virtual Earth mapping system.
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HotPads combines map data from Microsoft's Visual Earth with real estate listings to help you find a place to live -- whether you're interested in buying or renting, or need help deciding.
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Google on Monday added details of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) environmental projects to its popular global online mapping service.
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Blog: Google acquires Panoramio, a Spanish photo sharing site that maps photos on Google Earth
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will work with 3D design and visualization software developer Dassault SystÃ¨mes, to add a new dimension to its Virtual Earth mapping and satellite imagery service, the companies announced Tuesday. Through this partnership, Microsoft will be able to invite users of Virtual Earth to contribute their own 3D models of buildings featured on the maps, much as Google already does with the "3D Warehouse" layer in its Google Earth software and the free modeling tool Google SketchUp, now at version 6. To encourage development of models for inclusion in Virtual Earth, Dassault SystÃ¨mes has built an online community, 3dvia.com, around consumer uses of its and other companies' 3D modeling tools. The community began life as Teapotters.com, a creative project set up by a group of Dassault employees, but opened its doors as 3Dvia.com As a demonstration of what's possible, Dassault SystÃ¨mes is offering a free 3D model of a much sought-after electronic gadget -- not partner Microsoft's Zune music player, but the iPhone to be launched by Apple on Friday. The iPhone model can be viewed using the 3D Life Player browser plug-in from VirtoolsÂ of Paris and, if you catch the angle just right, offers an unexpected view of the inside of the gadget. Dassault SystÃ¨mes also announced partnerships with two French companies, RealvizÂ of Sophia Antipolis and Allegorithmic of Clermont Ferrand, to make their technology available to members of the 3dvia.com community. Allegorithmic will allow community members to use its procedural textures to decorate their models. Procedural textures are patterns of shading created according to a series of rules or algorithms to resemble real-world surfaces such as rock, foliage or sheet metal. They are often used to render more realistic scenery in video games without the need for storing voluminous image files. Realviz makes software used by film makers and game developers to create photorealistic 3D images. One of its applications, VTour, can be used to construct three-dimensional models of scenes from a single photograph. Dassault SystÃ¨mes will integrate VTour with 3dvia, allowing users to combine their 3D models with 3D backdrops created from photographs. Dassault SystÃ¨mes also plans a business side to the 3dvia community, called SupplierSource, to help designers find manufacturers for their products. The SupplierSource site, which the company said will appear at http://www.suppliersource.3dvia.com/, is not yet live.
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The Google Earth Blog (not owned by Google) reports that Nasa has released some new image overlay &#038; visualization data for Google Earth: NASA continues to add some great visualizations for overlaying in Google Earth. This time they have added some data again from MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer).  As recently reported, you can get near real-time [...]
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Google has launched a program to help nonprofits use Google Earth to raise awareness of their missions and better demonstrate what they do