The mysterious disappearance of the Microsoft Live Search Maps add-in for Outlook

For several years now, Microsoft has provided a plug-in for Outlook which provided some nice mapping functionality for calendar entries, contacts, etc, using Virtual Earth aka Live Search Maps. I briefly tried this, and liked it, several years ago but haven't looked at it for a while, not least as I've been using Mac for the past couple of years now.

Anyway, we have started work on an Outlook add-in for whereyougonnabe, so I thought a logical thing to investigate would be this existing Live Search Maps add-in for Outlook - it would be an easy way of associating a location with a calendar entry, including validation of the location with a nice interactive map, all within Outlook. But when I started looking for it, I found lots of references to it online, but the add-in seems to have mysteriously vanished.

For example, this post on 12 Cool Outlook Add-Ins To Make Your Inbox More Social And Productive, dated April 17th, 2008, says:

The Live Search Map add-in for Outlook lets you add maps and directions to the meeting requests while sending it to the attendees, calculate travel distance and estimate travel time between locations, add meeting reminders with estimated travel time blocked in the calendar.

You can see the maps in various types of views like 3D, aerial, road, bird’s eye etc., print map and directions and even save the details for viewing offline.

However, when you follow the link it includes, which should take you to an Outlook site, this just redirects you to the maps.live.com site, with no sign of an Outlook add-in. Several other links I found did the same thing (for example from a glowing review by Ars Technica). Mysterious!

After a bit more hunting around, I found several recent Microsoft support posts talking about problems with the Live Search Maps add-in. This one on MSDN, dated 22 October 2008, says:

Several million of you have downloaded the Live Search Maps Add-in for Outlook which allows integration in Outlook with maps and has some cool functionality around extending your appointment blocks to account for automatically calculated travel time among other things. We have received a large number of support cases that are caused either directly or indirectly because of this add-in. These include hangs, crashes, and leaks.

It then talks in quite a lot of technical detail about the problems caused, and says that it may cause data corruption problems, before saying (the emphasis is mine):

The long-term plan for what to do about all the problems in this add-in has not been determined at the time of writing of this blog, but it may result in the download being removed from microsoft.com. This won’t help you fix up any items that already exist in your calendar though – nor will it prevent users from using the add-in if they already have it downloaded and installed.

Another support bulletin from Microsoft, dated December 16, 2008, describes how to uninstall the plug-in, saying:

The Live Search Maps add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook can cause significant problems for users of Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. These problems can cause Outlook to crash or to perform other undefined behavior. Additionally, the Live Search Maps Add-in creates items that have incorrect values. These incorrect values create problems with messaging applications.

The process to remove the add-in and clean up data seems fairly complex.

I haven't been able to find any information online to confirm this, but it seems to me that the add-in has indeed been removed, presumably because of these problems. For an add-in that is used by "several million" people (according to Microsoft), and clearly provides useful functionality (if it is working correctly), this seems a pretty unprofessional approach. I would expect that the original download page should still be there and should make some statement about the problem and what is being done to fix it, or whether this functionality is just being abruptly discontinued.

Does anyone out there know anything about this? Anyone from Microsoft care to fill us in?

Quick review of Microsoft Photosynth

As regular readers know, I've been an Apple convert for over a year now, and unlike a number of my friends who run multiple operating systems on their Macs, I have had no compelling reason to run Windows and so have resisted that and been living a largely Windows-free existence. The two main things I miss with not running on Windows are some of the cool 3D things Microsoft has been doing with Virtual Earth, and the impressive Photosynth. When Microsoft announced that Photosynth had moved from a closed demo version with a few sample datasets to a version which lets you create your own "synths", I thought I needed to give it a try (being a keen photographer).

I went to the site using my Mac and got the following message:

Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows. Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.

That was actually better than I thought - I'm pleased to see that they have a Mac version planned, and also that they have a bit of a sense of humor in their announcement :).

So anyway, I decided there was nothing for it but to dust off my old Toshiba Windows laptop and give the new Photosynth a try. When I first saw the original Photosynth videos, I was super impressed, but also a bit skeptical about some of the more extravagant claims of automatically hyperlinking all the photos on the Internet - it just seemed to me that there wouldn't be enough differented features in many photos for that to work. And that is somewhat borne out by this guide to creating good "synths", and by my experience so far using Photosynth - there are definitely techniques to follow to make sure that the process works well. Check the guide for full details, but in general it is good to take a lot of overlapping photos, more than you might think, with relatively small changes in angle or zoom to ensure that all the photos are matched.

Click here to see these synths

I created several synths today, starting with a couple of the inside of my loft, and then doing some exterior ones. You can check them out here (Windows only, as previously noted - and you have to install a plug-in, but it's worth it). Overall the process was very easy and I was impressed with the results. It took about 10-15 minutes to create and upload a small synth, and a little over an hour for the largest one. You have to upload the data and make it publicly available at the moment (it sounds as though there may be more flexibility in this regard in future).

In a few cases, it didn't match photos which I thought it would have done. In general the issues seem to be either when you zoom or change angle by too large an amount, and it seemed to have a little more of a problem with non-geometric objects than with those with a regular shape. Also in a few cases I found the navigation didn't quite work as I expected. In the models of the Wynkoop Brewing Company and Union Station, it built everything into one continuous model, but I seem to only be able to navigate continuously around one half of the model or the other (you can jump from one to the other by switching to the grid view and selecting a picture in the other half of the model). If anyone discovers a trick which enables them to navigate around the whole of either of these models in 3D view let me know. I assume that this would probably not be an issue if I had taken more pictures going around a couple of the building corners. I also tried building synths of two smaller models - the Brewing Company and Union Station down the street, as well as a larger model which incorporated all the photos in the two smaller ones, plus a number of additional connecting photos - and it was interesting that some photos which matched in the smaller models did not match in the larger model (even though the photos they matched with previously were still there).

A cool user interface feature is the ability to display the point cloud generated by Photosynth by holding down the control key, and dragging the mouse to rotate. And another cool thing to try is using a scroll wheel to zoom in dynamically on the current image.

It's fun to be able to take pictures at very different detail levels - if you look around in the larger synth of my loft, you can find one of my favorite recipes and see what's on my computer screens. I think there's quite a bit of scope for doing cool creative things in synths - Paula appears in a few of the photos in my loft, and not in others with similar viewpoints, which gives an interesting effect, and I think you could have some fun with changing small things in between photos (but not so much that Photosynth can't match correctly). I think you could also add annotation to certain images, that is on my list of things to try too. I also plan to experiment with doing some which combine different lighting conditions, and would like to do some HDR photosynths using photos like the following - which will be a bit more work but I think would be well worth the effort.





Coincidentally, I recently heard from Gigapan Systems that I have made it onto the list to get one of their beta panoramic imaging systems, which should be arriving shortly, so it will be interesting to compare the two different approaches to creating immersive image environments. I don't expect to compete with Stefan's impressive Ogle Sweden expedition, but hope to find time to do a few more cool synths and panoramas over the next few weeks.

Improving software quality

I had missed this previously but Glenn reported from the ESRI conference that the "#1 time saver" in ArcGIS 9.3 is the ability to report product bugs more efficiently :O. Don't get me wrong, all products have bugs, I'm all for being able to report them easily, and this is a useful feature. And I'm sure customers are pleased to hear about a focus on software quality. But to me it sends a pretty negative message to the marketplace about how much time your users spend entering bugs for any software company to present this as the top productivity improvement in a major new release - it seemed like a very odd way to present it to me!

However, ESRI has not gone as far as Microsoft in its dedication to improving software quality. A friend of mine recently drew my attention to the program highlighted in the video below, which I highly recommend watching. I am thinking of instituting a similar program at Spatial Networking :) !!

No data creation in neogeography - errr????

I found this post at All Points Blog rather bizarre, on how "neogeography is not GIS". It quotes Mike Hickey of Pitney Bowes (the company formerly known as MapInfo) saying that "there is no data creation in neogeography", when perhaps the most notable trend in the industry at the moment is how crowd-sourced or community generated data is radically changing the way we create and maintain data. I discussed one example in my previous post about OpenStreetMap. There was an interesting link in the comments on that post from my former Smallworld colleague Phil Rodgers on the Cambridge Cycling Campaign's route planner, which also uses community generated data to provide a level of detail not available from any commercial data providers. In doing some further reading on OpenStreetMap I also came across this interesting comparison of their data versus Google's in the small town of Hayward's Heath in England, via an interview on the ZXV blog. And of course there are hosts of other sites generating many different types of geospatial data via community input. The post also said that there is "no spatial analysis" in neogeography, when again there are many interesting developments in this area outside the traditional GIS space - for example what FortiusOne is doing with GeoCommons, and companies like BP and others are implementing increasingly sophisticated applications with Virtual Earth.

I'm afraid this comes across to me as another rather poor attempt by old school GIS guys to justify their continued existence in a rapidly changing geospatial world. Absolutely there will continue to be specialized analytical applications which require specialized software and skills, but the new generation of geospatial software systems will continue to eat into applications which were previously the domain of the traditional GIS companies at a rapid rate, and making blatantly incorrect assertions about "neogeography" isn't going to change that trend.

King Canute trying to turn back the tide

Never a dull moment in the Social Networking space

Well, I knew we were jumping into a hot space when I started Spatial Networking, but the activity in the social networking area in the five weeks since we started has been pretty mind-boggling. First, Facebook announced their fbFund (actually just before we formally incorporated the company) which aims to encourage application development on the Facebook Platform by offering grants of $25,000 to $250,000 - which seemed like one good indication that we were getting into an interesting area. Then, after Steve Ballmer saying that social networks seemed "faddish", Microsoft invested $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, valuing them at $15 billion when they only have an estimated $150m in revenues. For a few weeks now there has been great anticipation about Facebook launching a major new advertising initiative, which is expected to be announced next week on November 6.

And then yesterday, there was a major announcement from Google about a new open platform called Open Social, which is as the name suggests a new open approach to social networking. As Techcrunch puts it, "within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game". The impressive list of partners involved includes LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo and - interestingly - salesforce.com and Oracle, who are (presumably) looking to applying some of the principles of social networking in a business environment. We had been thinking about potential applications for our system with salesforce.com before this announcement.

So this all seems like good news for us, in terms of enabling us to integrate the location related functionality we're developing (focused on Facebook initially) with multiple systems using one standard approach.

Microsoft Virtual Earth now supports KML

Well, you read it here first - Microsoft announced that they are indeed supporting KML now. They have announced some other really nice looking enhancements too, especially leveraging some of the techniques they developed in Photosynth for display of birds eye imagery. More coverage at SharpGIS, Google Earth Blog, James Fee, and a cool video at the Virtual Earth Blog.

Oh the irony

I switched to using a Mac a few months back, as I've mentioned before. I have been getting quite into Keynote, Apple's presentation tool which competes with PowerPoint, and you can do some really cool things with it that blow PowerPoint away. So I'd been working on my five minute lightning presentation for FOSS4G and it was really a thing of beauty, the transitions and animations were amazing, it had really cool special effects, videos, everything ... George Lucas would have been proud of it.

And then I hear from Paul Ramsey on Friday and he says "we need your presentation in Open Office or PowerPoint format as we'll be presenting them all from the same PC". PowerPoint? PC? Aargghhh!!! Of all the places to force me to convert my beautiful Mac presentation back into a boring old PowerPoint to run on a PC, I didn't think it would be at an open source conference ;) !! Oh well, I'll have to save the launch of my Keynote pyrotechnics for another occasion :). To be fair, Paul has had a huge amount of work organizing all sorts of things for the conference so I can quite understand him wanting to simplify the presentation logistics ... but I figured I still needed to give him a bit of a hard time!

Anyway, it will force me to focus on content versus style. I am talking about the "past, present and future of the geospatial industry" in five minutes, so will be interesting to see if I get through it all before I'm thrown off :) !!

GeoWeb report - part 1

Well, I made it back from the big road trip up to Vancouver for the GeoWeb conference. We got back home on Sunday evening, after a total of 3439 miles, going up through Wyoming and Montana and then across the Canadian Rockies through Canmore, Banff, Jasper and Whistler, and coming back in more of a straight line, through Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Utah. The Prius did very well, performing better at high speeds than I had expected.

But anyway, the GeoWeb conference was very good. The venue was excellent, especially the room where the plenary sessions were held, which was "in the round", with microphones, power and network connections for all attendees (it felt a bit like being at the United Nations). This was very good for encouraging audience interaction, even with a fairly large group. See the picture below of the closing panel featuring Michael Jones of Google, Vincent Tao of Microsoft, Ron Lake of Galdos, and me (of no fixed abode).

I will do a couple more posts as I work through my notes, but here are a few of the highlights. In his introductory comments, Ron Lake said that in past years the focus of the conference had primarily been on what the web could bring to "geo", but that now we were also seeing increasing discussion on what "geo" can bring to the web - I thought that this was a good and succinct observation.

Perhaps one of the best examples of the latter was given by Michael Jones in his keynote, where he showed a very interesting example from Google book search, which I hadn't come across before. If you do a book search for Around the World in 80 Days, and scroll down to the bottom of the screen, you will see a map with markers showing all the places mentioned in the book. When you click on a marker, you get a list of of the pages where this place is mentioned and in some cases can click through to that page.

This adds a powerful spatial dimension to a traditional text-based document. It is not much of a jump to think about incorporating this spatial dimension into the book search capability, and if you can do this on books, why not all documents indexed by Google? Michael said that he expected to see the "modality" of spatial browsing grow significantly in the next year, and he was originally going to show us a different non-public example in regard to this topic, but he couldn't as he had a problem connecting to the Google VPN. My interpretation of all this is that I think we will see some announcements from Google in the not too distant future that combine their traditional search with geospatial capabilities (of course people like MetaCarta have been doing similar things for a while, but as we have seen with Earth and Maps, if Google does it then things take on a whole new dimension).

Another item of interest that Michael mentioned is that Google is close to reaching an arrangement with the BC (British Columbia) government to publish a variety of their geospatial data via Google Earth and Maps. This was covered in an article in the Vancouver Sun, which has been referenced by various other blogs in the past couple of days (including AnyGeo, The Map Room, and All Points Blog). This could be a very significant development if other government agencies follow suit, which would make a lot of sense - it's a great way for government entities to serve their citizens, by making their data easily available through Google (or Microsoft, or whoever - this is not an exclusive arrangement with Google). There are a few other interesting things Michael mentioned which I'll save for another post.

One other theme which came up quite a lot during the conference was "traditional" geospatial data creation and update versus "user generated" data ("the crowd", "Web 2.0", etc). Several times people commented that we had attendees from two different worlds at the conference, the traditional GIS world and the "neogeography" world, and although events like this are helping to bring the two somewhat closer together, people from the two worlds tend to have differing views on topics like data update. Google's move with BC is one interesting step in bringing these together. Ron Lake also gave a good presentation with some interesting ideas on data update processes which could accommodate elements of both worlds. Important concepts here included the notions of features and observations, and of custodians, observers and subscribers. I may return to this topic in a future post.

As anticipated given the speakers, there were some good keynotes. Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, and widely known as a "Father of the Internet", kicked things off with an interesting presentation which talked about key architectural principles which he felt had contributed to the success of the Internet, and some thoughts on how some of these might apply to the "GeoWeb" - though as he said, he hadn't had a chance to spend too much time looking specifically at the geospatial area. I will do a separate post on that.

He was followed by Jack Dangermond, who talked on his current theme of "The Geographic Approach" - his presentation was basically a subset of the one he did at the recent ESRI user conference. He was passionate and articulate as always about all that geospatial technology can do for the world. A difference in emphasis between him and speakers from "the other world" is in the focus on the role of "GIS" and "GIS professionals". I agree that there will continue to be a lot of specialized tasks that will need to be done by "GIS professionals" - but what many of the "old guard" still don't realize, or don't want to accept, is that the great majority of useful work that is done with geospatial data will be done by people who are not geospatial professionals and do not have access to "traditional GIS" software. To extend an analogy I've used before, most useful work with numerical data is not done by mathematicians. This is not scary or bad or a knock on mathematicians (I happen to be one by the way), but it does mean that as a society we can leverage the power of numerical information by orders of magnitude more than we could if only a small elite clique of "certified mathematical professionals" were allowed to work with numbers. Substitute "geographical" or "geospatial" as appropriate in this statement to translate this to the current situation in our industry.

For example, one slide in Jack's presentation has the title "GIS servers manage geographic data". This is a true statement, but much more important is that fact that we are now in a world where ANY server can manage geographic data - formats like geoRSS and KML enable this, together with the fact that all the major database management systems are providing support for spatial data. There is a widely stated "fact" that many people in the geospatial industry have quoted over the years, that something like 85% of data has a geospatial component (I have never seen a source for this claim though - has anyone else?). Whatever the actual number, it certainly seems reasonable to claim that "most" data has a spatial component. So does that mean that 85% of data needs to be stored in special "GIS servers"? Of course not, that is why it is so significant that we really are crossing the threshold to where geospatial data is just another data type, which can be handled by a wide range of information systems, so we can just add that spatial component into existing data where it currently is. Jack also continues to label Google and Microsoft as "consumer" systems when, as I've said before, they are clearly much more than that already, and their role in non-consumer applications will continue to increase rapidly.

But anyway, as Ron said in his introduction, it would be hard to get two better qualified people than Jack and Vint to talk about some of the key concepts of "geo" and "web", so it was an excellent opening session. I think that this post is more than long enough by this point, so I'll wrap it up here and save further ramblings for part 2!

Microsoft Virtual Earth to support KML

I'm at the GeoWeb conference in Vancouver which has been good so far - I will be posting more when I get time, but it's been hectic so far. However, I just thought I would do a quick post to say that in the Microsoft "vendor spotlight" presentation which just finished, the speaker said that Virtual Earth will support the ability to display KML in a September / October release this year. Maybe I missed something, but I hadn't seen this news elsewhere. I just did a quick Google and this post at Digital Earth Blog says that at Where 2.0 in June they wouldn't comment on support for KML, and I didn't find any other confirmation online of the statement that was made here today, which makes me wonder whether this comment was "officially blessed". Has anyone else heard this from other sources?

This would make a huge amount of sense of course, given the amount of data which is being made available in KML, but nevertheless Microsoft does have something of a track record of trying to impose their own standards :), and they have been reluctant to commit to KML up to this point, so I think this is a very welcome announcement (assuming it's correct), which can only cement KML's position as a de facto standard (I don't think Microsoft could have stopped KML's momentum, but if they had released a competing format it would have been an unfortunate distraction).

Local search on Microsoft Local Live

Steve Lombardi from Microsoft emailed me about the local search issues I raised in regard to Google Maps on the iPhone (and other mobile platforms) in my earlier post. In that post I compared the results I got with Google to those I got from MapQuest - I would have tried Microsoft Local Live also, except I had been under the mistaken impression that it didn't work on my Mac ... turns out it doesn't work with Safari (you get a very scaled back site which is pretty useless), but it works fine with FireFox (for 2D stuff - Virtual Earth in 3D, and Photosynth, are actually the things I miss most in Mac land so far!). So I was pleased to discover that I can at least use the 2D stuff still.

Steve had tried the same tests I did on Local Live, and I tried them for myself and it fared well. With luck, this live link will give you more or less the same thing as the screen shot above. I ran several tests in my previous review, all centered on 1792 Wynkoop St, Denver, CO. For full details see the earlier post, but I'll summarize the earlier results here too. These were the test searches and the results I got with Local Live:

• King Soopers (a local supermarket chain): Google returned 4 non-existent results in the top 10; Microsoft and MapQuest both had no errors but some duplication, in the sense of having multiple addresses close by for the same store. M&M both correctly located the closest store but Google didn't (unless you count manually discarding results with incomplete addresses)
• Tattered Cover (a well known Denver bookstore with 3 locations): Google returned 4 non-existent results in a list of 8, while M&M both returned only the 3 correct store locations.
  
• Office Depot and Home Depot seemed to work fine with everyone, with no obvious errors.
  
• A search for grocery yielded 4 out of 10 incorrect results on Google and 10 reasonable looking results on MapQuest (though I didn't verify them all). With Microsoft the top result was incorrect, an incomplete address which just said "Denver, CO", similar to those which caused a lot of the errors with Google. And the second address on the list was interesting - it was Cowboy Lounge, which is a nightclub which used to be Market 41, which appeared on the Google list also, incorrectly categorized as a grocery store (you can understand how the mistake occurred given the original name). Interesting that Microsoft picked up the name change, which Google didn't, but still has the incorrect categorization. However, one good thing with Microsoft is that I was given the option to provide feedback that the result was incorrect, so I did that and asked this it should be removed from the grocery categories (and I provided feedback on the previous incorrect result too). The rest of the list appeared to be legitimate establishments, though the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory and Cookies by Design are a broad interpretation of "grocery" :) !! So Microsoft did better than Google but not as well as MapQuest on this one. I will be interested to see if and when my feedback on the incorrect categorization gets through the system, I will check it out every so often to find out!
  

So overall, both Microsoft and MapQuest appear to have much better quality in their points of interest data than Google does (admittedly based on a fairly small sample). As I said previously, as consumers start to use location based services more, data quality will be a really critical factor in end user satisfaction. Your system might have the coolest user interface in the world, but by the second or third time it has taken you to a non-existent location, I can pretty much guarantee that you will switch to something less sexy but with more reliable data. This is a scenario where false positives (returning a location of interest which does not really exist) are in general much worse than false negatives (not returning a real location of interest). If I'm desperate for a beer and you direct me to a bar which is two miles away but ignore one which is one mile away, at least I get my beer pretty promptly (though I would have been happier if I could have walked). But if you take me to several nonexistent locations first and I hunt around at each one for a while to try to find the bar which is supposed to be there, I will be thirsty and grumpy and resolving to find a new LBS to help me next time :).

A couple of other quick observations on the Microsoft Local Live implementation. One is that it lets you place a pin at your original location of interest, and also display pins in different colors showing multiple different query results at the same time - this feature is nicely done and not available in Google either online or mobile. The results include some ads, but these are clearly separate from the result listing. The results come back sorted in order of "relevance", which I think is probably in most cases a euphemism for "more or less by distance, but with scope to move sponsored results further up the list" - which is what Google appears to be doing with its mobile maps as I discussed previously. But with one click I can change this to sort by distance, and on both these lists it shows the distance of each result from my starting point. As a user I am quite happy with this approach - it gives the service provider (Microsoft) the chance to monetize their service with ads and preferred placement, which ultimately is necessary otherwise service providers won't be able to continue to provide their service, but it doesn't hamper my ability to easily get the specific information I want (as Google Maps Mobile does).

Steve tells me that the same local search capabilities are available in Microsoft Live Search for mobile ... but unfortunately there's not much chance of me testing that any time soon, as I am already suffering enough abuse over having both an iPhone and a BlackBerry 8800, so I don't think I can justify adding a Windows-based smartphone to the collection :) !!

Microsoft SQL Server Spatial update

I attended the Microsoft SQL Server SIG at the ESRI User Conference to hear a short update from Ed Katibah, who is leading the development of the SQL Server spatial capabilities. I thought he said a few interesting things of note, which I hadn't heard elsewhere. One was that they are doing nightly performance tests against all their major competitors, including Oracle, Postgres, Informix and DB2, and, while he wasn't allowed to be specific, he was "very pleased" with the results. He showed an example of a polygon with 600,000 vertices and 7,000 holes, and said that it could be intersected with an offset version of itself in 15 seconds on a 1GHz machine. From the way Ed described the spatial indexing approach, I suspect that it will probably do a pretty good job on this problem of Paul Ramsey's, though I'm sure it would take more than that for Paul to consider a Microsoft solution :) ! He mentioned that Microsoft was rejoining OGC - they had left because of legal concerns relating to how OGC handled certain IP issues, but these had now been resolved. He said that the target for release was middle of next year, and that there was a very strong focus within Microsoft on meeting that deadline. Both Ed and various ESRI people mentioned that Microsoft and ESRI had been working together to ensure that ESRI would support the SQL Server Spatial capabilities.

ESRI integration with Google and Microsoft

I thought that one of the more significant announcements in the plenary session at the ESRI User Conference was the functionality in 9.3 relating to integration with Virtual Earth and Google Maps / Google Earth. Up to this point, as I've commented before, ESRI has seemed a little reluctant to integrate with these systems, and third party software like Arc2Earth has filled that hole. The Microsoft Virtual Earth blog talks in more detail about the integration capabilities with Virtual Earth. In the plenary, there was a brief demo which showed a nice looking analysis from ArcGIS Server overlaid in a Virtual Earth environment. Given the results of the ESRI customer poll in this area, I guess this type of integration was inevitable, but I still think it's a significant step. Jack consistently tried to position Google and Microsoft as "consumer" products in his talk, but it is clear that they are already being used in many business-oriented applications. Once these easier integration capabilities are available, it will be interesting to see whether that accelerates the move of these "consumer" systems into the application spaces traditionally occupied by the established geospatial vendors. This is scheduled to be available from ESRI next year, while Intergraph plans to provide similar capabilities this year.

Interesting points from ESRI customer survey

ESRI has published a lengthy pre-conference Q&A document on the user conference blog, which several people have commented on. One answer talked about results from their customer survey, and I thought this highlighted some interesting industry trends.

They said that 45% of customers have asked for tight integration with Google Earth and nearly 47% have asked for support for interoperability - so overall, 92% of ESRI customers are looking for integration with Google Earth (assuming that these two response categories were mutually exclusive, which seems to be the case from the context). For Virtual Earth the numbers were a little lower, 26% and 43%, so 69% in total. This is just reconfirmation of the trend we are all aware of that "serious" GIS users are interested in using Google and Microsoft as a means to distribute their data - but it's interesting to see hard numbers, and 92% is a resounding endorsement for Google. It's also interesting that the vote for Google is quite a bit higher than Microsoft. I think that in the consumer world and the blogosphere, Google has pretty clearly had a higher geospatial profile, but among "corporate" GIS users I have talked to, many have had a bit more of a leaning towards Microsoft, if only because their organizations tend to be doing business with Microsoft already. This survey goes against the subjective impression I had formed on that particular point (admittedly from a small sample size).

The other point that was interesting was that 80% of customers want ESRI to support or tightly integrate their technology with the upcoming Microsoft SQL Server spatial extension - this is a very high number, especially given that Oracle probably still has around 50% of the database market share (48.6% in 2005, according to Gartner). These two numbers don't directly correspond in that the ESRI number is based on number of customers, so is likely to more strongly reflect the interests of smaller organizations (assuming that there are a large number of small organizations responding), whereas the Gartner number is based on revenue so probably more influenced by large organizations. But nevertheless, a very strong statement about the level of interest in Microsoft SQL Server Spatial.

There is a separate statement that less than 19% of customers have asked for tight integration with Oracle Spatial - but unfortunately no comment on what percentage want "support" for Oracle Spatial (which is currently provided via what was ArcSDE, now part of ArcGIS Server), so no direct information on relative levels of interest in Oracle versus SQL Server. I have been thinking for a little while that Oracle Spatial is at an interesting juncture in terms of its position in the market, but I'll save my thoughts on that for a future post :) !

Thoughts on this week's news

It's been a busy week for news, with many announcements timed to coincide with this week's Where 2.0 conference and the Google developer day. And for the past couple of weeks I have been on vacation in the UK with limited Internet access, but got home to Denver last night so am trying to catch up a little.

Both these events were covered extensively online, for example at Google Earth Blog and AnyGeo, as well as the official Where 2.0 site. I thought I would just add a few comments on some of the announcements that I thought were interesting.

Google had a busy week, with announcements including the new Street View in Google Maps, Mapplets which they describe as an easy way of doing "mashups of mashups", and the acquisition of Panoramio. Microsoft announced availability of 3D building data for New York City in Virtual Earth (for the second time - and unlike the last time it's really there now!), as well as a lot of additional data in other places.

The Street View is very nicely done I think, providing a good balance between rich data and simplicity of use. Exactly where you can go and which directions you can look in are more constrained than in a full 3D environment like Google Earth, Virtual Earth or SketchUp, but it's a lot easier to navigate along a street and get an impression of how a neighborhood looks with this more constrained approach. The way that one view smoothly transitions to another maintains context very well. The fact that the data comes from Immersive Media is interesting - I have seen their stuff a few times before and been impressed with them. They capture continuous data from a spherical assembly of video cameras, so this suggests that there is a richer set of data behind street view than is actually exposed at the moment. For example, when looking around Denver I found myself wanting to look upwards at times when I was in front of a tall building, which I could only see the lower portion of. But of course this would add some complexity to the user interface, so there are trade-offs in adding this type of functionality.

This raises the interesting question of the relative value of a "true 3D" environment like Virtual Earth or Google Earth versus a "pseudo 3D" environment like that provided by Street View - and how the value relates to the cost of capturing the data. Obviously there are things you can only do with a true 3D environment, but for many applications something like Street View may both provide a simpler user experience, while the data is much cheaper to capture.

The Panoramio acquisition raises a few questions for me. It's presumably not a technology play, as there's nothing difficult about displaying geocoded photos in Google Earth or Maps. So I suppose it's primarily a content play - they have around a million geocoded photos, but this small compared to the 18 million or so geocoded photos which are currently in flickr, and which can easily be displayed in Google Earth or Maps in many different ways. Google has its own online photo sharing service integrated with the Picasa photo software it acquired. They really need to integrate these two offerings quickly - you don't want to have to do something different for photos that you want to assign a location to. I want to be able to upload all my photos to one site (I use flickr these days), and assign locations to some of those as appropriate (soon that should be automatic via the GPS in my BlackBerry!) - I don't want to have to load those which I want to display on a map to a different site. So anyway, it will be interesting to see what Google does in this area.

Microsoft announced its touch table for what it calls surface computing (short video here). This incorporates the idea of multi-touch interaction, which has been around for a bit and will be included in the iPhone - this is a powerful way of interacting with maps. But it also adds in the notion of interaction with multiple different devices by placing them on the table. This is an example of what has been called sentient computing or ubiquitous computing, which I was involved with at Ubisense. An important notion here is computers reacting based on what is happening in the physical world. In particular if you can precisely determine location of objects (probably within inches for this type of application), you can do some very innovative things in terms of user interaction with computers. The Microsoft technology is based on video recognition, using cameras located in the table. Unlike a lot of other research systems in this type of area which are pretty far away from being commercially available, the table will be commercially available this year, and not too outrageously priced for something like this - they say in the range of $5-10K, and expect the price to come down significantly over time.

Finally for now, FortiusOne announced availability of GeoCommons which is interesting. They are trying to bring more sophisticated geospatial analysis to a broader market, and have done a lot of work to assemble publicly available datasets into the GeoCommons database. I plan to look more at that in a future post.

Google versus Microsoft

My previous post "Google gets it right" generated a bit of discussion on the relative merits of Microsoft and Google in the mapping space. I just wanted to say that I am relatively neutral on that score at the moment - I think that each has strengths relative to the other, and we are in the early stages of what will be a major battle between the two of them (and perhaps others, such as Yahoo), over the next few years. Google built up some good momentum ahead of Microsoft, first with Google Earth and then with Google Maps, and I think that their relatively recent announcement that they are indexing all KML files on the web gives them another advantage, because of their leadership in search. However, as I wrote about in GeoWorld a little while ago, Microsoft has a strong track record of being a "fast follower" and gaining market leadership after initially falling behind - as it did to Apple with Windows, and to Netscape with Internet Explorer.

The most obvious area where Microsoft has a significant technical advantage over Google is in its 3D building models and the techniques and technology it acquired from Vexcel to enable it to automatically build these from accurate photogrammetric data. I don't see how Google's current approach of allowing the community to upload models will come anywhere near the accuracy or completeness of what Microsoft is doing there. It requires a major investment to match what Microsoft is doing in this area (Microsoft say they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this). A related area where Microsoft has an advantage also is in the "Birds Eye" oblique imagery data that it offers, which Google doesn't. I think that Microsoft seems a little more focused on pushing Virtual Earth as an application development platform in the business world, though admittedly that's subjective - and both of them really need some work on their licensing arrangements for commercial use. As discussed in the comments on my earlier post, in some areas Microsoft has better imagery than Google (such as the village of Cropston in the UK, where I am at the moment), but the reverse is true in other cases - it's hard to draw any clear conclusion there without a lot more analysis. Other related technologies of interest that Microsoft has include SQL Server Spatial (coming next year), and Photosynth, which is one of the coolest new technologies I have seen for a while, which has a lot of potential for being integrated with Virtual Earth.

But having said all this, Google still seems to have the mindshare and momentum in the online hacker community, where people are developing lots of cool things, and in the blogosphere. KML has great momentum as a format for publishing geospatial data. But both companies clearly see the mapping / geospatial area as a major battleground and are investing significantly to try to get the upper hand, which can only be good for the industry.

Intergraph integrates with Google Maps and Virtual Earth

Intergraph has announced at its Intergraph 2007 conference a new capability for its GeoMedia WebMap product to be able to produce mashups with Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth, without requiring any programming. This will be available in GeoMedia WebMap 6.1 later this year. I think this is potentially a very significant announcement - I have been saying for some time that the traditional GIS vendors need to leverage what Google, Microsoft et al are doing and not try to compete with it, and had been pushing this in my time at Intergraph. But it's a big culture change to do this as it starts to take these vendors down a path where they have less control in their customer base than they have done in the past. ESRI in particular seems reluctant to go down this path - they have nothing comparable to this new offering from Intergraph at the moment, it is left to third parties to provide software like Arc2Earth.

This solution lets you do anything you can do with GeoMedia WebMap in terms of sophisticated visualization and server-based geospatial analysis, and overlay that in Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth. The press release isn't specific on this point, but my understanding is that the GeoMedia maps can be created "on the fly", or they can be published as tiles in advance, for very high performance like that achieved with Google Maps and Virtual Earth. Intergraph has not done a great job historically in promoting the full capabilities of GeoMedia WebMap, which has had comprehensive server-based geospatial analysis and visualization capabilities since long before ESRI brought out ArcGIS Server.

So I think this has great potential technically - a key question in terms of how successful it will be in the bigger scheme of things is whether Intergraph will get more creative in the way it markets and licenses GeoMedia Webmap to get greater uptake in the market.

SQL Server spatial

There have been various comments floating around about Microsoft's announcement of spatial support for SQL Server, ranging from great excitement to extreme skepticism. I have known about this for a while under NDA, and I think it is an important step for the industry. While Oracle Spatial has been out for 12 years so Microsoft has quite a bit of catching up to do, many of the recent Oracle developments have been focused beyond pure "spatial database" functionality, and more into functionality that was previously the domain of the GIS vendors, such as spatial analysis and mapping - I think that Microsoft should be able to provide core database functionality relatively quickly. It will be good for the industry for Oracle to have some more serious competition within the commercial database world, in regard to spatial. It really reinforces the trend that everyone has been talking about of geospatial data becoming mainstream, now that the top two commercial database vendors will both support spatial. The fact that Microsoft has an offering both in the space of the new disruptive online mapping offerings, with extensive packaged data (like Google and Microsoft) and in the database (like Oracle, which does not have an offering in the former space), opens up some interesting possibilities for them to offer solutions leveraging both aspects. I think that geospatial technology has much higher visibility at high levels in Microsoft than at Oracle (driven by Virtual Earth) - I talked more about this in an article at Geoplace.

So Microsoft will need to follow through on the announcement, and has plenty to do to catch up with Oracle and the various open source spatial database offerings, but it's another important step in terms of geospatial really being a major area for Microsoft.

The Day ArcIMS Died

James Fee has an interesting post on "The Day ArcIMS Died", talking about the impact of Arc2Earth Publisher. I think that aside from the obvious impacts that Google and Microsoft are having on the geospatial industry, a more subtle one is that they are helping to crack the unswerving devotion that most traditional GIS users have generally had to their selected vendor.

Google and Microsoft have such a high profile that it is hard for even the most insular organizations to ignore what they are doing. My hope for the industry is that this will help open people's eyes to the fact that there may well be better solutions out there than their current vendor provides, not just from Google and Microsoft but also from other companies or open source initiatives, so I think we will start to see more organizations selecting software based on its merits, rather than just choosing their incumbent vendor without doing any real evaluation. There was another interesting debate on James' blog a little while ago on the topic of "Are we begining to see a shift away from ESRI Server backend to Open Source solutions?", and one of the comments there said "I work for a US government agency that is getting ready to send out a RFP for GIS servers that has no ESRI requirement. A first for us". This type of increased competition will only be good for end users.

I think that traditional geospatial vendors who do not embrace and leverage what Google and Microsoft are doing, but try to fight them, are fighting a losing battle. Heterogeneous geospatial systems will be much more common than they have in the past.

Virtual Earth 3D in New York??

I have heard from several Microsoft people that they had created a 3D model of New York City but it just hadn't gone online yet. So I was pretty excited to see the Virtual Earth for Government blog announce that this was now live and "man is it ever cool" - and they have a very cool screen shot to back it up. But sadly when I flew over to New York, I just saw a handful of 3D buildings on a flat map :( ... hopefully it will be there for us non-Microsoft people soon, but not quite yet I guess.

I flew back over to Denver, which does have a very cool 3D model, and saw an advertising banner for the first time - I have seen talk that Microsoft was going to add banners in, but this is the first one I have actually seen. It was a large banner for the movie Eragon, suspended above the Denver Performing Arts Center - here's a screen shot.

One cool thing about Virtual Earth which doesn't seem to me to have been very widely publicized is that it works with an XBox 360 controller - you can just fly around using the joysticks and buttons, which is much smoother and easier than using a mouse and keyboard. After someone from Microsoft showed me this, I went and bought an XBox controller just for this!