14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is moving forward with its tradition of releasing massive updates to its mapping, search and location platform. According to the Redmond company, the latest refresh to Bing Maps, formerly referred to as Virtual Earth, introduces an additional 9,460 square kilometers of imagery. Although Microsoft only offered notice of the update in November, the additional imagery that has become available to Bing users worldwide was labeled as the October 2009 update to the service. Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps Technical Evangelist for Microsoft noted that the imagery update is largely focused on North America and the United Kingdom.
“We just shipped another 9,460 square kilometers of imagery onto Bing Maps. This month’s release showcases high precision imagery for the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom. The biggest drop by far was Greater Vancouver Metro. In any case, it’s all 15-30 centimeter resolution imagery, so it’s pretty stunning. We also released a refresh of the mobile tile set for vector (road) maps,” Pendleton stated.
An imagery update that covers 9,460 square kilometers of territory is nothing more than routine for Microsoft, at least as far as Bing Maps is concerned. Bing Maps was refreshed in August with imagery of 101,486 kilometers of territory, and a previous update weighed in at 41 Terabytes (TB) of data.
At the same time, the Redmond company is not, in any way, done with the content that it still has to upload to Bing Maps. Last month, Microsoft teamed with DigitalGlobe, one of its partners and supplier of satellite imagery for Bing Maps, to launch a Bing rocket into space. The DigitalGlobe’s Boeing Delta II 7920 successfully took the WorldView-2 satellite into orbit, delivering a new source of imagery for Bing Maps.
“You can check out the full details of the release on the Bing Maps World Tour application which allows you to sit back and let the application give you a guided tour of the new imagery; or, you can navigate yourself to see the new imager, including previous releases,” Pendleton noted.