Second Light is a new development of MS research on Microsoft’s multi-touch device Surface. It basically allows to display additional information in some kind of hidden light layer above the Surface screen. That way, extra map layers, like labels, can be shown on top of a base map without covering geographic objects for instance. It seems to be an interesting option for visualizing and exploring geographic content – makes me wonder when we see Virtual Earth demoing on Surface.
The video below gives a quick demo of how Second Light works.
Vienna didn’t make into that update, so I can’t check my rooftop right now, but according to the MSDN team blog Vienna 3D is going to be added within the next couple of months to Virtual Earth.
Maybe we can already explore 3D stadiums in Virtual Earth during EURO 2008? [via rolf]
User generated content means users care what happens to their content. They even might act like shareholders and want a vote or at least share their opinion. It’s a totally interesting aspect in business decision making processes – asking the crowd before the board.
I personally don’t care if Yahoo! is taken over by Microsoft or not. If the service is good and works for me, I use it, no matter what label is on it. [via Max]
Good news for all German Virtual Earth mash-ups: Microsoft finished an imagery update for entire Germany, based on data delivered by Intergraph (and GeoContent). According to Intergraph’s press release the new maps provide an accuracy of up to 1m in rural and 50cm in urban areas. Additionally, Microsoft’s fantastic Bird’s eye view is now available for 80 German cities.
GoYellow, based on Endoxon (which was partly acquired by Google), seems to be using the same imagery, but somehow the softer coloring and cartography do look better in Virtual Earth.
Same imagery, different visualization. [via Geobranchen.de]
I hope Austria will follow soon. Next year the Euro 2008 is happening here and the main stadium in Vienna still looks a bit fuzzy. Some parts of Austria are well covered by Herold maps (the Austrian yellow pages company), but they don’t provide an API, so no luck for external applications.
Not only Vienna is heating up this week, we’re heading towards 35°C and more every day, no, even mapping sites are called hot today:
Microsoft released their research project Virtual Earth Hotmap.
Hotmap gives some insights about place popularity and shows where people have looked during the past 6 months in Virtual Earth.
It’s quite interesting that the map, the overall picture, is similar to other (spatial) analysis results we do in our day-to-day job: the map, literally based on hits and page impressions, shows an urban/rural divide and structures along major transport axis. Besides large urban areas, some tourism regions can be identified too – lake regions in Carinthia, skiing regions in Salzburg and Tyrol.
After a quick look at Virtual Earth Hotmap I’d say it provides some interesting data for regional marketing purposes and could be used additionally to other (tourism) website traffic analysis. E.g. if a tourism region doesn’t show up in Hotmap then probably not too many people are looking for information about or even searching directions to it (and going there?).
How to determine a file type of some really old Macintosh data with no file extensions, where the resource fork got totally screwed and you give up on visually scanning 6 and more megabytes binary code in your favorite text/hex editor?
fire up Microsoft Word (if available)
choose from the menu “File” and “Open”
set the file type to “Recover text from any file (*.*)”
hit open
It will filter any human readable text in your file and let’s you take a good guess by what program the file was originally created. Brilliant! [via FILExt]
I hope Austria will follow soon. Next year the Euro 2008 is happening here and the main stadium in Vienna still looks a bit fuzzy. Some parts of Austria are well covered by 
