Earthware Blog

Now in our fourth year of partnership with GoLearnTo.com we are delighted that the website we have been involved in developing continues to go from strength to strength. In the last month GoLearnTo has added no less than four awards and nominations to their impressive array of successes including…

Tongue Twister…

The International Association of Language Centres has voted GoLearnTo.com agency of the month recognising them as a leading language travel agency. The IALC recognize the quality and teaching standards of GoLearnTo.com’s range of courses where you can learn Spanish in Spain or learn French in France and over 14 more languages worldwide.

Best holiday experience provider…

GoLearnTo.com have been nominated for a British Travel award in the category ‘Best Holiday Experience Provider’. It’s a great honour to be nominated for the 2^nd year running proving there’s no stopping the public’s appetite for learning new skills on holiday.

Best new agency…

Language schools from over 30 countries worldwide have voted for GoLearnTo.com in the best new agency category for Language Travel Magazine’s star awards. GoLearnTo.com has been specially recognized as a ‘star’ agency for their work to make language learning more fun and a holiday activity by combining languages with a unique range of fun activities such as cookery holidays in Italy, yoga holidays or even surfing, dancing, horse riding and much more.

And the website of the year goes to…

GoLearnTo hope to be in with a chance of winning the Good Web Guide’s Website of the Year Award after being nominated this year.

This proves once again how an aesthetically pleasing, functionally rich and easy to use website designed and developed by The Technology Studio with maps by Earthware can do for you.

We are also really excited to be working on a potentially groundbreaking project with GoLearnTo using Microsoft Silverlight and Bing Maps to offer a rich multimedia experience all within a map – watch this space!

Earthware’s Avimap demos (TheWorldCupMap and CountryBehindTheCup) are being noticed left right and centre with the latest review coming from C21 Media.net, the digital publishers who broadcast all things television business news and information related.  

Read their full article about CountryBehindTheCup here. 

Regular readers of our blog will have heard about Earthware’s TheWorldCupMap which we launched at the beginning of the 2010 World Cup football tournament. This week has seen our newest addition to the map, CountryBehindTheCup, being launched.

Continuing our partnership with Skyworks, the company behind the high definition video footage of the football stadiums shown in TheWorldCupMap, the CountryBehindTheCup map features Skyworks’ HD video documentary originally made for TV which gives a factual tour of South Africa the country, rather than South Africa the country hosting the World Cup.

The video footage has been combined with Bing Maps Silverlight technology in the same way as TheWorldCupMap did to create an aerial journey across South Africa giving an example of the ‘art of the possible’ of how any geographical data (text, images and video) can be combined with online mapping to create an interactive and visually engaging experience to the user.

This technology has great potential to change the way people research holidays online – imagine using a travel map which contains similar video, plus images and text, to investigate the location where you are planning to spend your next break. Suddenly your research has become a whole lot easier.

For further information about displaying your data on a web based map or to see how travel maps could help your agency differentiate themselves please contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880 or email info@earthware.co.uk

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to leap out of an aircraft near the edge of space and plummet to earth ? Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner hopes to make an attempt later in 2010, travelling the 23 miles at eye-watering super-sonic speeds.

[http://www.space.com/news/highest-parachute-jump-supersonic-100126.html]

For the rest of us there is the Silverlight Bing Maps Control. Not quite as glamorous but, equally not as uncomfortable.

This sounds like a rather simple Silverlight application, create a map, start zoomed out from your landing point and then smoothly animate the ZoomLevel parameter to ‘plummet’ to earth. The problem is that the default map animation moves too quickly and you cannot animate the Map controls ZoomLevel property yourself from a Storyboard, as Storyboard animations only operate on DependencyProperties.

ZoomLevel is not the only value that developers have needed to animate in past that has not been a DependencyProperty. The solution is to set the Storyboard animation to target your own class member as a DependencyProperty which in turn can modify your intended object member.

Within your Silverlight control constructor.

Handy Attachments utility class

Most of this was gleaned from [http://www.conceptdevelopment.net/Silverlight/VEMap05/] and [http://bryantlikes.com/archive/2009/03/23/animation-hack-using-attached-properties-in-silverlight.aspx]

Just to make things a little more realistic the Map object centre Location property can be animated to provide wind shear.Instead of animating the Latitude and Longitude separately a Point based DependencyProperty can be created.

Within your Silverlight control constructor.

New property for the Attachments utility class

Now clip the Map to a circle and animate the containers Angle with a regular DoubleAnimation to create a truly sickening spiralling to the ground experience.

The smooth zooming and panning was used to great effect to navigate around the South Africa world cup football stadiums in time with HD video in our World Cup map http://www.theworldcupmap.com

Having your property listed on a online map has become an essential part of the property marketing process so its little surprise really that Google have joined the party launching their latest addition to Google Maps in the UK – property listings. Any property portal, estate agent or even individual seller/landlord can list their property as for sale or for rent to be displayed on the property maps when a search matches the properties specification.

Listing properties on the map is free (Google have funded the new functionality through advertising placed around the maps) and it is this fact has caused a lot of unrest with the UK’s major property portals such as RightMove, who provide a similar property listings maps but which agents have to pay to advertise on. However, other portals including Zoopla, Zoomf, and Property Pal have chosen to jump on board with this latest free online marketing tool and have formed partnerships with Google to list their properties on the maps. Many other independent estate agents have also taken advantage of the functionality with Google now saying that within 24 hours of the maps being live they have hundreds of thousands of properties listed.

Home buyers and renters can use the maps search functionality, which can be turned on or off by selecting ‘properties’ found under the ‘more’ button at the top of the maps, to find properties to suit their needs. Users can search by city/locality by moving the map and zooming in, or by price range, type of property (detached, semi detached or townhouse/unit), number of bedrooms and number of bathrooms using the tick boxes to the left of the map.

The ideal scenario for any buyer or renter is to only need to look in one place in order to see all (or at least the vast majority of) available properties. It is exactly this position that the portals are fighting to become, with RightMove winning that fight in the residential property market. Google’s move into the property market will only make maintaining their positions as the top property portal list more difficult – something they are understandably nervous about. As for the user – maybe it’s a good thing. It might just force all the portals to improve the service they offer in order to differentiate themselves and retain custom.

If you are interested in using property mapping in your website to market available properties we can help. Contact us on 0845 642 9880 or email info@earthware.co.uk

This is our first screen cast in a series showing how to develop your own Bing Maps App using the recently released Bing Maps App SDK. If you are interested in developing Bing Map Apps for your company or clients and want to get an overview of what they are and how they work then check out the screen cast below. If you want to find out more about Bing Map Apps development please get in touch.

We recommend clicking the HD button on the video below to view the screen cast on vimeo in HD

It seems that we are not the only people who think that TheWorldCupMap, Earthware’s tour of the World Cup stadiums, is pretty cool. The guys at BBC sport also agree and have added it to their dedicated World Cup page alongside their own venue guide and Fifa’s offering too. It’s great to have our work recognised in this way and to see this amazing new technology being used so well.

TheWorldCupMap shows what the ‘art of the possible’ of online mapping is. It is the world’s first release of Aerial Video Integrated Mapping (Avimap) technology which combines the Bing Maps Silverlight mapping API, the latest Internet Information Services (IIS) smooth streaming technology and Windows Azure cloud hosting to give a movie-like experience of a location. 

If you would like more information about how you could use the latest web mapping technology to display your business information in a compelling way please contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880 or email info@earthware.co.uk. 

Here at Earthware we are all very excited about the World Cup. However, it’s not the goals (or lack of!) that has got us energised, it’s our latest web based mapping solution, Avimap, which provides an interactive aerial tour of all the stadiums hosting World Cup football matches. Even if you can’t make it to South Africa in person with this online mapping application you can now visualise where all the action is happening as you fly over the stadiums at the same time as viewing the surrounding area in the map and understanding where the stadiums are located in relation to each other. Take a look for yourself by visiting http://www.theworldcupmap.com.

Avimap combines the very latest in online mapping technology, Bing Maps Silverlight, with high definition aerial video footage, from Skyworks, to create an application using cloud hosting from Mircosoft Azure allowing the user to explore any location in a smooth movie-like way.

To our knowledge this is the first time anyone has combined digital maps and aerial videos and used cloud hosting to produce an experience like this and it’s not just mapping football stadiums that this technology can be used for. The scope for any business, but especially those in the travel sector, is endless. Imagine embedding travel mapping into your website clearly displaying everything anyone could want to know about a destination at the touch of a mouse button.

If you would like to find out more about how digital maps can differentiate your brand, drive customers to your website and convert leads please contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880 or email info@earthware.co.uk.

It’s something of a milestone week for Microsoft’s Bing Maps with the launch of its Map App SDK (Software Development Kit) at Microsoft’s TechEd convention in New Orleans.

Developers can now download the Bing Map App SDK and start building, testing and submitting applications which if approved by the Bing Maps team, could feature in the Bing Maps App Gallery.

Earthware has already developed three map apps on behalf of Microsoft: the Bing Maps World Tour, Foursquare Everywhere and Oodle property apps. These provide great examples of what Bing is calling “truly compelling map experiences”.

Speaking about the launch of the Bing Maps App SDK, Brian Norman, Earthware’s Technical Director, said: “The public availability of the SDK opens the door to some groundbreaking new Apps which will really show the potential for businesses in providing rich visual web experiences by harnessing the power of mapping. Here at Earthware, we’re working on some exciting new Apps for the Bing Maps Gallery to complement the ones we’ve developed so far, including Foursquare and Oodle. Watch this space!”

To access the Bing Map App SDK, login to Microsoft Connect at http://connect.microsoft.com/bingmapapps (you’ll need a Live ID).

Please feel free to contact us if you are looking to explore how Bing Maps or any other interactive web based mapping, can help your business.

This week has seen a further development in global web based mapping technology with Google’s announcement that it has augmented Google Earth into Google Maps, creating a 3D rendering of certain locations when used with a supported browser.

This update to Google Maps, called Earth View, enables users to view 3D images of a number of the world’s most iconic places. In the UK, these include the Houses of Parliament in London, Stonehenge and even the Lake District.

Go to Google Maps and click the ‘New!’ link in the top right-hand corner and then enable “Aerial Imagery” and click on “save changes”. Then select one of the listed examples, sit back and enjoy!

Commenting on the Google’s Lat Long blog, Google Product Manager, Peter Birch, wrote:

"Earth View offers a true three-dimensional perspective, which lets you experience mountains in full detail, 3D buildings and first-person dives beneath the ocean. The motion is fluid, and you can see the world from any viewpoint".

Coming five years after Google Earth was launched, Earth View is available through the installation of a browser plug-in it originally issued in 2008, enabling dramatic detailing using the Google Earth fly-through interface.

The Grand Canyon, as viewed with Earth View in Google Maps.

San Francisco is one area where 3D perspective of an urban view is available in real detail.

(Credit: screenshots by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Microsoft is currently working on its own 3D view of the world by enhancing its Bird’s Eye perspective in Bing Maps using the Silverlight plug-in.

Brian, Earthware’s Technical Director believes, “It is great to see these premium beta features make it into the consumer site offering some real competition to Bing’s 3D maps”.

Please feel free to contact Earthware if you are looking to explore how Google Maps, or any other web based interactive mapping, can help your business.