Earthware Blog

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/

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award programme is an annual award given to members of the technical community that show an outstanding contribution as they actively share their expertise with peers. There are over 100 million people participating in technical communities each year, yet only 3,500 are awarded the MVP status and this year Earthware’s Technical Director, Brian Norman, is one of them!

Brian has been named a Windows Live Platform MVP as a result of his activity in technical communities as he shared his passion for developing online applications that are rich in content and simple to use but that also give a real, tangible value to business rather than being the latest gimmick.

Having been nominated for the award, a panel of Microsoft employees and previous MVP’s assess the nominees technical expertise and voluntary contributions over the previous year to technical communities based on their quality, quantity and the impact they have had within the technical communities. MVP’s are not spokespeople for Microsoft or an employee, rather they are objective technical experts with an award from Microsoft that recognises their achievements and knowledge.

Brian regularly contributes to the Bing Maps MSDN forum, he writes on interactive mapping developments for Earthware and on technology solutions for The Technology Studio. You can also follow Brian’s actions on Twitter (@Earthware).

Well done Brian!

The Microsoft Bing Enterprise Mapping team approached Earthware two months ago, with an idea to communicate their monthly imagery releases to clients and partners in a more visually engaging format.

With each month’s imagery release potentially covering hundreds of updated locations worldwide the current system of publishing a simple list of all the locations was not demonstrating the full impact of each release. Microsoft was also keen to use their latest Bing Maps Silverlight control, to create a visually rich interactive mapping application which could be both a showcase for the monthly updates, and the possibilities that Silverlight and Bing maps can offer.

Microsoft were also keen to host the new application on the Windows Azure platform to show the flexibility of combining Azure services with the Bing Enterprise maps.

Why Earthware?

Earthware already had extensive experience with Bing maps and the new Silverlight control after taking part in the closed beta program in early 2009. As part of this Earthware produced a Twitter map demo application which Microsoft demoed as part of the Bing Maps Silverlight control’s release publicity. The Twitter demo also used the Azure platform.

What did we deliver?

• A visually rich mapping application using Microsoft’s Bing Maps Silverlight Control and hosted on the Windows Azure platform.
   
• A secure back office administration area to allow the Microsoft team to quickly, and easily, add and update monthly imagery release information.
   
• A back end database built upon the Windows Azure table storage service.
   
• The entire first release of the Bing Maps World Tour application was delivered in less than six weeks and in time for the challenging May 2009 imagery release deadline.
   

Try the finished Bing Maps World Tour application for yourself on the Bing Maps Website or read more about the application at the official Bing maps blog. You can also see the reaction of the developer community to the applications release on twitter.

If you are interested in Earthware helping you to create similar interactive animated mapping applications for your products please visit our interactive mapping consultancy page.

Microsoft has just announced the release of the latest updates to their Photosynth technology, which through an integration with Microsoft Virtual Earth means that the technology can now be used commercially.

What is Photosynth?

Photosynth ‘stitches’ together digital photos of any object or location giving the user a 3D, 360-degree, interactive experience of the space. You can navigate around the ‘synth’ to view the object or location from all angles (according to the number and position of the original photos) and zoom in to the images to see the detail.

What has been added to Photosynth?

The latest release of Photosynth introduces:

· Commercial licensing - businesses can now use the technology to give their customers an exciting new way to explore and interact with their products, whether that be a hotel room or a car

· Privacy controls - users can now choose how they share the synths by making them public or unlisted on http://www.photosynth.net

· One click highlighting – makes navigating through the synths much easier

What have Earthware been doing with Photosynth?

At Earthware we have been playing with photosynth for a while now, and with Microsoft’s latest updates we have now made live our new property photosynths map using Virtual Earth in London property consultants Residential Land displaying three of their properties using this new technology.

Residential Land users are used to seeing the great Aerial and Birds Eye imagery of property that is available with the Earthware Property interactive maps already available on the site, but now with the Photosynth map they can also see the inside of the properties. They can ‘walk’ around the space to discover how the rooms flow together and even zoom in to see what the cupboard door handles in the kitchen are like. Buyers/renters are able to see the property inside and out without actually needing to go there, opening up more properties to them and therefore increasing Residential Lands rental and sales figures.

View the photosynth map to see exactly how Residential Land are using photosynth and contact Earthware to find out how you could be using it too.

Using the latest technology from Microsoft we can plot live written information on a map. I expect you have now at least by now heard of Twitter. At the recent G20 protests in London, many people were communicating with each other via Twitter to share things such as which roads were open, where not to venture and even the location of public toilets.

We have been working on a demo which uses Microsoft’s latest mapping technology to integrate mapping with twitter to allow people to tweet their message and location and plot these on a map to show thoughts and details on a specific topic/event, for an international company, or for global issues. Here is a demo app we created that was used by Microsoft in the launch event for their new mapping product. It shows you the kind of things you can do with animation and mapping.

Contact Earthware for more information about social media mapping.

This isn’t the end of our playing and development, there are a couple more ways that we can help you can to use visual media to market your services on the way but these are still hush hush. Watch this space as we will be announcing them in the coming weeks.

Any of the concepts which I have introduced over the past few days can be used in combination with each other to generate a very rich interactive experience. For more information about social media mapping or any of our other marketing tools contact Earthware.

Last October we worked with an imagery partner to release Street Level View imagery of London in one of our client’s sites, Novaloca.com five months before Google launched Street View.

Our partner will take the pictures for a small area, route or for a whole city as is requested. They will edit them for privacy concerns and then we can add them to our interactive maps adding a new visual representation of a location. The images can be taken before an event to show the route/area or can be taken as the event is taking place to allow the participants to see themselves. The images can be embedded into maps along with local area information and important landmarks for the user to navigate through, or we can create a video of it.

View central London in Street Level View for an example of the imagery.

Read more about Street Level View or for more information contact Earthware.

Tomorrow… Social Media Mapping