Earthware Blog

Well, in a virtual sense at least. Foursquare is a fast-growing location-based game that allows you to ‘check-in’ to locations from your mobile device that is shared with users and your community of friends. As well as showing where people are, thanks to GPS technology, you can provide tips and advice about a specific location. Think of it in terms of a real-time version of Trip Advisor.

In offering this information, you earn ‘badges’ and when you’ve collected enough, you are considered influential enough to be given the keys to your city in the shape of a virtual ‘Mayorship’ of the location where you checked- in. This concept reflects foursquare’s slogan, “Unlocking your city.”

Microsoft recently commissioned the development of a new Application from the team at Earthware using the Silverlight Bing Maps Control so you can now see where Foursquare users are checking-in via Microsoft’s Bing Maps in real time.

Click on ‘Map Apps’ bottom left and you’ll see a menu which shows Foursquare Everywhere. The mapping facility within the App is seamless, enabling ultra-fast zoom functionality. As it loads, you’ll see tips from users who have tagged a location with additional information. A continually updated flow of ‘check-ins’ is presented on the left of the screen and as you zoom out to a country or global view, Foursquare check-ins are indicated as pinpoints on the map.

Checking the box “auto-center the map on new updates” allows you to watch the map fly around the world as people check in everywhere!  If you’re not seeing data on the map, chances are you’re zoomed into an area where people aren’t playing Foursquare so either move the map or zoom out. If you click on one of the pieces of data pinned to the map you’ll get a pop up with the name of the location which you can click to zoom down.

Speaking at the Where 2.0 conference in California recently, Bing Maps’ architect Blaise Agüera y Arcas demonstrated the new Foursquare Everywhere feature on the Bing Maps platform, which was a proud moment for the Earthware team. Agüera y Arcas described the service as a “mash-in” rather than a “mash-up”, with Bing Maps working as a surface on top of which different applications and services can be integrated.

“With a mash-in model like this, the interaction is much more rich and fluid than with a traditional mash-up technique, as everything is discoverable in one place,” he said.

Ensuring user privacy, Bing Maps only shows information from the Foursquare API that users have agreed to share. Users can select their own privacy settings, allowing them to decide if they want to share their location, for example. Bing Maps doesn’t store any user information provided through the Foursquare Everywhere App, as it streams data directly to the map in real time.

If you would like to find out more about map Apps, Bing Maps or Silverlight please get in touch with us.

After months of biting their tongues, Bing have finally announced their latest additions to Bing Maps by releasing the beta version of Silverlight Bing Maps which features two new map modes (Streetside View and Enhanced Bird’s Eye) plus an Application Gallery and also Photosynth to name just a few.

The entire site is built in Silverlight (although the Bing Maps AJAX site is still available  if for some reason you don’t want to see the amazing new features). Features include:

Streetside: ground level, fully stitched together high res photographs giving a seamless 360 degree panorama.

Enhanced Bird’s Eye: In urban areas: Bing have used high resolution photography and stereo data to create 3D models of locations and placed them into the 2D interface of a webpage but with 3D aspect ratio from Silverlight 3. In non-urban areas: Bing have used their satellite imagery and aerial photos and re-projected the Earth to give a better perspective of the world.

Application Gallery: a catalogue of all the Bing Maps applications creating a simplified search and bookmarking function.

Photosynth: now fully integrated into the maps so you can fly in from space straight into your next door neighbours lounge(!) (but only if they have created a synth of course).

Simultaneous Multiple Searches: perform multiple searches within one map to discover all you can (tweets, blogs articles, local businesses, imagery etc)about a location without leaving the map.

Local Search Integration: Bing Local Search fully integrated into Bing Maps (the opposite has been available for a while).

Simplified Navigation: The navigation buttons have been moved to the bottom of the page and you can select Automatic (based on user feedback), Road, Aerial or Bird’s Eye or Streetside (our new friend ‘Blue Man’) views.

Integrated 1-Click Directions: if you know where you’re trying to get to, search for the location and select directions to get there approaching from the north, south, east or west.

Route Query Parsing: if you are planning to drive from, for example, Seattle to San Diego just enter “Seattle to San Diego” in the search box and get point to point driving directions.

Auto-Location Detection: when you load Bing Maps in Silverlight the site will automatically detect where you are located and centre the map to show your current position.

Weather: weather information has been embedded into the maps allowing you to view the latest weather conditions at your current location (using the auto-location detection) or for the location you are searching for.

Images: Bing Image Search has been integrated into Bing Maps giving you instant access to images of the location you are searching for.

Defined Regions Query Parsing: search for a neighbourhood within a city, for example, “San Diego Gaslamp,” and the map will centre on that neighbourhood and highlight the area on the map.

For a full list and description of the new features read Chris Pendleton’s blog or if you would rather watch a demo click here.

The Earthware team has been eagerly awaiting this latest offering from Bing Maps. The enhanced functionality is set to make displaying and searching for location based information much more simple. We know the Bing Maps team have been working very hard to develop this and we congratulate them on what they have achieved.

If you are interested in creating a map using Silverlight (or any other mapping API) to display your information then please drop us a line at info@earthware.co.uk.

Having released Photosynth for commercial use Microsoft  have now announced their commercial terms making it clear how this technology can be used.

Using Photosynth

As long as the synths embedded in a website comply with the terms of use, are publicly available and use under 20GB of storage they are free. If you want to make your synths private (not listed on the photosynth website) you can ‘unlist’ them but this comes with some restrictions. Unlisted synths are limited to 1GB of storage (it is 20GB for public synths) and synth views (when a view opens a synth) are limited to 500 per month. If the way you use photosynth exceeds or is likely to exceed these limits you will need a photosynth commercial license.

Benefits of a commercial License

• All the benefits of unlisted synths (not listed on the photosynth website or indexed by search engines)
• Unlimited synth storage
• Unlimited synth views

Synth views are counted as Microsoft Virtual Earth billable transactions. Microsoft track how many synth views are used and charge accordingly.

Photosynth has many applications in the commercial market. For example, Earthware client London Property specialists Residential Land are using it in the Virtual Earth property maps to give internal tours of their available properties.

Happy synthing!