Today, at Tech Ed 2010 in New Orleans, the Bing Maps team is making some major announcements that are sure to please. Chris Pendleton came by our studio to talk about the SDK release and to give a hands-on demo of some of the new apps. He also promotes a few contests and explains why you really need to start developing applications for Bing Maps right now!
Read the full blog post HERE.
We got a ton of great feedback and suggestions last week- please keep them coming! Here’s the low-down for what ‘Softies were talking about this week.
New type of Cloud Computing?
Bing for Mobile
Microsoft Concept Phone
Office 2010 Launch
This week on Channel 9, Brian and Dan discuss the week’s top developer news, including:
Picks of the week:
To win a copy of Brian’s book:
To win an autographed copy of Brian’s book, be the first person to post a comment with the right answer to this question:
Update: We have a winner! Mohammad Jalloul correctly guessed “Rosario.” Read more about the selection of this code name here.
Mashable just launched a new website function that highlights Local Twitter Trends on a Bing Map. The application is intended to give devoted Mashable readers a sense of trending topics in selected areas around the world. Wondering what people are tweeting about in New York? Click the pin in New York and the popup balloon will show the top New Yorker Tweeting trends. And hey, this was so interesting that Chris Pendleton sat down to talk about it with Mashable CEO, Pete Cashmore.
Cmdlets are small scripts used in Windows Powershell. You can find documentation here, and you can download Cmdlets here. What you may not have known is that Bing has a visual search for Cmdlets that can save you some time. Once the results load, you can see the top 12 on the left navigation as well as types, and when you click on a Cmdlet, it will load the details in a preview pane on the right, where you can see code examples and a brief description of the Cmdlet. You can even narrow your Cmdlet search by version and uses.
Our good friend, Chris Pendleton, decided it was time to give the technical peeps out there a sneak peak into how Bing Maps created the Streetside user experience. So, while our satellite imagery and orthographic aerial photography (Aerial map style) provide great context to accompany our vector-based raster maps (Road map style) and our oblique imagery (Bird’s Eye map style) is even higher resolution for increased zoom and cardinal rotation capabilities, Streetside brings you down to ground level (and you can go inside with Photosynth). Anyhow, for those of you interested in how they use Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) with photography (Photogrammetric processing) through a Silverlight interface and vector road information for reference points- this video is for you!
Matt Scott of Microsoft Research walks us through Engkoo: the new “dictionary” vertical search of Bing in China. What makes this English-Chinese assistance tool unique is that it unifies human translation mined from the web, machine translation, and a language learning experience, into one easy to use search and explore interface. By continuously discovering and processing high quality translation knowledge on the Internet, this technology can be used to close the ever expanding translation gap between English and Chinese.
Engkoo is a collaboration between Bing, MSN, and Microsoft Research – leveraging years of research in Natural Language Computing, Speech, Human Computer Interaction and Web Search & Mining. Because the technology is language independent, next steps include building on it for other language pairs in the future
The dream team is back. Well, nobody really calls them the “Dream Team” but they do – anyway, they’ve rustled up the top stories at Microsoft this week and here they are:
What happens in Vegas, happened at MIX!
Laura’s Keynote Demo
FourSquare & Bing, a natural fit
Seinfeld & Gates ads explained
Microsoft goes to Coachella???
…the furry coat (pre-Laura’s capture of it)
Bob Visse is the GM of Product Management and was one of the people behind the new MSN redesign. Some of the new features include the integration of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Live. MSN is moving toward offering more localized content, including headlines and links that appeal to your specific demographic, combined with a tighter integration with Bing that offers readers links to things like local restaurant reviews and ratings. With many new partners such as Hulu and National Geographic, MSN is also offering more video content. Page load time was also whittled down, giving readers a snappier experience.
Chris Pendleton and I sat down and he showed off the amazing new World Wide Telescope and Bing Maps integration. The WorldWide Telescope application allows you to view most of the features available in the Silverlight client right in Bing Maps. Yes, the WWT provides real time information about how the space is moving over the Earth. This provides context for where celestial entities are in real time if you were to look up at the night sky. Upon launching the WWT Bing Maps App, you may get so excited and just want to see SOMETHING, so just jump right in with stars.
For more info check out Chris’s BLOG POST.