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

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.

Within hours of Google launching Google Street View imagery covering 99% of UK roads, Earthware has released their first implementation of the new imagery in commercial property portal NovaLoca.com.

The Google Street View imagery in NovaLoca.com allows users to view commercial property in the major UK cities and in smaller towns and villages right across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The user now gets an even better impression of what a property being advertised on the site is like, without having to visit it in person, making finding commercial property easier than it has ever been before.

Earthware and NovaLoca have been working together for a long time to keep NovaLoca’s property mapping well ahead of the competition. In October 2008 we implemented the very first UK street side imagery in NovaLoca’s maps for commercial property in London before Google released any of their Street View imagery in the UK. This latest addition means that Street View imagery is now a standard function of the property maps where ever you are looking for commercial property in the UK. Yet again, this means NovaLoca have beaten all their competitors by becoming the first UK commercial property website to be using this technology.

If you want to know how you can use online mapping and Google Street View in your website please contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880.

Google Maps have today launched Google StreetView imagery for the entire UK and we mean the entire UK!  Nearly a quarter of a million roads across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are now available to ‘walk’ down from your computer screen. The 360 degree pictures mean you can have a good look around as you travel down the street, and you can deep zoom into the images to see the detail (although faces and registration plates are blurred out in accordance to the privacy protection rules).

But Google have been even busier than that: they have also released Google Street View imagery covering the majority of France, Italy and Spain too.

Although Google Street View has been available in 25 major cities in the UK since March 2009, to now have Street View right across the UK is a phenomenal achievement from the Google Maps team and will be changing the way people use online maps to display geographical information in interactive maps. The StreetView maps can be embedded into any website to help businesses display their location and any geographical information on a map, immediately we see major benefits from property mapping and travel mapping.

For anyone that’s interested you can now see where all the Earthware fun happens:
View Larger Map

If you are interested in how you can use Google Maps and Google Street View to display your information then contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880.

Earthware is an entrepreneurial company specialising in developing online mapping solutions and websites using the latest technologies. Silverlight is proving to be the future direction of our company which is why we are looking for a developer with experience in this technology but with a hunger to learn more both here and in other technologies and to apply this throughout the planning, designing and development process. Other required skills include strong full life cycle Asp.net, C# and WCF, whilst experience with Ajax frameworks, XSLT / XML and unit testing is desirable.

If you fit this description and are interested in applying for the position please email your CV explaining how you meet our requirements and giving example projects/URLs to recruitment@earthware.co.uk.

All applicants must be eligible to work in the UK. No contact from agencies please.

Earthware are delighted to have been invited by Gary McCausland (from BBC1’s “Axe the Agent” to do the web design, web development, interactive mapping and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for his new venture Rovster.

Rovster allows a property owner who wants to “sell my house privately” to sign up and advertise online with a free property listing.  Whether you have flats to rent, property to rent or you want to buy a property in … or sell my house in …. then Rovster is seeking to debunk the property market.

We are delighted that not only did Gary decide to integrate Earthware interactive property mapping but also to use our sister, The Technology Studio to do the web design and development.

We wish Gary every success with Rovster!

The Earthware team

This year Earthware are taking part, for the first time, in the AGI conference’s new GeoWeb stream on September 23rd – 24th 2009. Our technical direction Brian Norman will be talking about the future of web based mapping in the travel and real estate markets at 11:15 on 24th. It’s presentation partially aimed at developers but if you have an interest in either of these markets please come along and join in.

This year is the first year the traditionally pure GIS focused conference has had a stream dedicated to nanogeography (the world of mashups) so it should be really interesting to see how GIS professionals, web developers and designers can come together during the conference to discuss the different aspects of our GeoWeb of the future.

If you’re coming along it would be great to meet up so please get in touch brian@earthware.co.uk or twitter.com/earthware.

To read more about the event or to book your ticket please visit http://www.agi.org.uk/