14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is not only adding new content to its mapping, location and search platform on a regular basis, but also making sure to break the records it sets in terms of the size of the updates. The latest imagery refresh offered to Bing Maps users covers no less than 6.7 million square kilometers, and, according to the Redmond company, it is the largest ever introduced in the history of the service. The 6.7 million square km update to Bing Maps announced at the end of the past month is considered an integral part of the February update for the platform.
At the start of this year, Microsoft kicked off a series of multi-million square km imagery refreshes for Bing Maps. However, the first two updates, in January and February, were only approximately 1 million sq km in size. The last refresh is almost seven times larger, according to Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps technical evangelist for Microsoft.
“Last month we pushed out our largest amount of new imagery EVER in terms of square kilometers. This month, we’re blowing THAT record out of the water. You thought 1 million+ sq. km. was large? How about 6.7 million square kilometers! It’s pretty much unfathomable. The big winners? Aerial: The Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and most places in the US where we had black and white imagery. Bird’s Eye: Sweden,” Pendleton revealed.
In January 2010, Microsoft graduated the Silverlight flavor of Bing Maps from Beta to RTW (release to web). But integrating Silverlight was not the only way that Bing Maps evolved. The platform also grew with Streetside, designed to enable users to explore street-level photographs, but also with Enhanced Bird’s Eye imagery, Application Gallery and Photosynth integration. More importantly, Bing Maps evolution is a continuous process, as Microsoft showed in the first half of February, while unveiling integration with technologies such as World Wide Telescope, Indoor Panoramas and Video Overlay.
Pendleton outlined the locations that were updated with new imagery:
Aerial
Australia 524,645 sq. km. Botswana 61,433 sq. km. Estonia 618 sq. km. Hungary 3,369 sq. km. Mexico 236,624 sq. km. Morocco 13,303 sq. km. Namibia 72,162 sq. km. New Zealand 14,987 sq. km. Poland 6,254 sq. km. Romania 3,695 sq. km. Russian Federation 553,244 sq. km. South Africa 123,138 sq. km. Turkey 16,148 sq. km. United Kingdom 15,221 sq. km. United States 4,961,758 sq. km.
Oblique (Bird’s Eye) Austria 238 sq. km. Belgium 898 sq. km. Denmark 718 sq. km. Finland 1,634 sq. km. France 2,001 sq. km. Greece 931 sq. km. Ireland 1,340 sq. km. Netherlands 1,709 sq. km. Norway 2,425 sq. km. Portugal 2,184 sq. km. Romania 1,534 sq. km. Spain 5,143 sq. km. Sweden 6,747 sq. km. Switzerland 424 sq. km. United Kingdom 13,094 sq. km. United States 56,007 sq. km.