As far as its mapping, search, and location Cloud platform is concerned, Microsoft is wrapping up 2008 with nothing short of a bang. Not only did the Redmond company take the Holiday celebration to a whole other level by housing Santa Claus' North Pole village in Virtual Earth and allowing users to track his journey around the world in 3D, but is also delivering a massive 48 terabytes (TB) update to VE. Microsoft is traditionally loyal to multi-TB updates for Virtual Earth, and the latest refresh makes no exception to this rule, with approximately 50 terabytes of new content.

“We’ve been doing some housecleaning the last 2 months with some of our road network data. As a result, [an update] to let you know of a HUGE refresh / release (48TB worth) of all tile sets where vector information is included – Road, Hybrid Aerial, and Hybrid Bird’s Eye,” Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth tech evangelist, Microsoft Live Search, revealed.

The December 2008 Virtual Earth data release comes after almost two months since Microsoft introduced the last update to VE. At the start of November, the Redmond company delivered no less than 41.07 TB worth of new aerial photography to Virtual Earth. Still, despite the Virtual Earth 3D Santa tracker experiment, the software giant has found the time to top the October 2008 update with the latest refresh of 48TB.

According to Pendleton, the December 2008 update to Virtual Earth includes “Global vector data updates. Multi-lingual tile sets for all zoom levels (French, Italian, German, Spanish). Japan localized tile sets. All oblique (Bird’s Eye) photography, reprocessed with new road labels (minus Japan). [As well as] new data source for the following countries: Greece; Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania; Kaliningrad; Oblast of Russia; Slovakia; Hungary; Slovenia; Croatia; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Serbia; Montenegro; Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia; Albania; Bulgaria; Romania, and Mexico.”