Digital Earth Blog — Keeping up with the various digital earths including Google Earth, Google Maps, Virtual Earth and others.

Massive update to Bing Maps

by mickey on March 5, 2010

Microsoft has just released their largest update ever to Bing Maps, with more than 6.7M sq. kilometers of fresh imagery.

They added a ton of new imagery in the Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and many places in the United States. They also added a lot of new Bird’s Eye imagery in Sweden. Check out their Bing Maps World Tour to see the highlights.

The full list of updates:

Aerial
Australia 524,645 sq. km.
Botswana 61,433 sq. km.
Estonia 618 sq. km.
Hungary 3,369 sq. km.
Mexico 236,624 sq. km.
Morocco 13,303 sq. km.
Namibia 72,162 sq. km.
New Zealand 14,987 sq. km.
Poland 6,254 sq. km.
Romania 3,695 sq. km.
Russian Federation 553,244 sq. km.
South Africa 123,138 sq. km.
Turkey 16,148 sq. km.
United Kingdom 15,221 sq. km.
United States 4,961,758 sq. km.

Oblique (Bird’s Eye)
Austria 238 sq. km.
Belgium 898 sq. km.
Denmark 718 sq. km.
Finland 1,634 sq. km.
France 2,001 sq. km.
Greece 931 sq. km.
Ireland 1,340 sq. km.
Netherlands 1,709 sq. km.
Norway 2,425 sq. km.
Portugal 2,184 sq. km.
Romania 1,534 sq. km.
Spain 5,143 sq. km.
Sweden 6,747 sq. km.
Switzerland 424 sq. km.
United Kingdom 13,094 sq. km.
United States 56,007 sq. km.

It’s quite impressive! Time to start digging around see what kind of fun stuff I can find in there.

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Amazing video of Bing Maps at TED

by mickey on February 14, 2010

Blaise Aguera y Arcas recently shared some new Bing Maps features with the audience at TED, and he showed off some amazing stuff. The way that Flickr images (and even video) are incorporated into the StreetSide imagery using PhotoSynth technology was stunning, as was some other features.

This eight-minute video is absolutely worth the time to watch it.

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More aerial views; National Geographic app; Google Maps for the indoors

January 23, 2010

A few cool things to point you toward today:
More Cities get “Aerial View” in Google Maps — Portland, OR and Sacramento and Oakland, CA all have new “bird’s eye” imagery from Google.
National Geographic launches iPhone app — It allows a variety of mapping sources, styles and other cool stuff.
Micello Launches “Google Maps for the Indoors” [...]

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Bing leaves beta, adds lots of data

January 19, 2010

Lots of big stuff happening with Bing Maps lately…
Vancouver and Whistler added to StreetSide: Good timing for both of this, with the Winter Olympics getting ready to start.
Two big imagery releases: 274K sq/km on January 5, and another 558K sq/km yesterday. Even better, yesterday’s release was apparently just part 1 of 2, so more is [...]

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Bing releases iPhone app with nice Maps implementation

December 16, 2009

Microsoft just released the “Bing” application for iPhone and it is a solid effort. It was voice search that is similar to the Google app, and Maps implementation that is similar to Google Maps on the phone.
It’s a free app, so it’s certainly worth downloading and trying out. Chris Pendleton has a nice writeup of [...]

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MapQuest launches its own StreetView clone: “360 View”

December 14, 2009

Less than two weeks after Microsoft launched “Streetside” imagery to compete with Google’s StreetView, MapQuest has done the same. They call it “360 View”, and it’s remarkably similar to Microsoft and Google’s offerings.
Like many of the “new” features on MapQuest lately, it’s far behind what Google has already done, and it’s not nearly as good. [...]

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Bing to take over MapQuest? It’s possible.

December 11, 2009

An article over on Screenwerk today seems to think that Microsoft may start powering the engine behind MapQuest, similar to how they power the search results for Yahoo.
It would make a lot of sense. Tons of people still use MapQuest, but the technology is getting rather stale. Putting Bing’s power behind all of those MapQuest [...]

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Microsoft teams with Navteq to expand their Streetside coverage

December 7, 2009

When Microsoft launched Streetside a few days ago (a direct competitor to Google’s StreetView), I wondered how they could possibly catch up with the huge amount of coverage that Google already has in place. Their answer: Navteq.
Navteq has vehicles on the road all the time, collecting road data (speed limits, bridge heights, etc). Microsoft plans [...]

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Bing Maps launches a ton of new features

December 2, 2009

Microsoft has been playing catch-up to Google in the mapping world for a while. Most of their “new” features are things that Google has had for a while. Today they caught up with a few more, and even surpassed Google with a few of them.
You can read the full list of new items on the [...]

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New Google Earth imagery/3D, Bing StreetView coming soon

November 20, 2009

A couple of quick links today:
Imagery update in Google Earth: Just two weeks since their last one, Google has pushed out another imagery update. It’s not a huge one, but it covers small parts of many countries.
New 3D imagery in Google Earth: Google has started using StreetView imagery in some cities to create lifelike facades [...]

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