Gur Kimchi (Bing Maps infrastructure Architect and Development Manager) sat down in an episode of Expert to Expert on Channel 9 to discuss the evolution of Bing Maps (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth). The interview goes pretty deep in discussing how the original Virtual Earth was built based on a Bill Gates approved Think Week Paper and a production-based prototype was done in 100 days; the comparison to Google’s investment in maps and data centers versus Microsoft’s and how Bing Maps was architectured from the onset to scale to a massive proportion. Worth the hour of your time required to understand Bing Maps from the inside-out.

Short: Erik Meijer and I paid a visit to Bing Maps infrastructure architect and Partner Development Manager Gur Kimchi for an Expert to Expert conversation about the design and architecture of Bing Maps. It takes some rocket science to process and coerce data into accurate information representative of points of interest on planet Earth. How does Bing Maps work, at the deepest levels, in the cloud? Gur and team have created a very efficient back end system that computes and returns the information you seek when using Bing Maps. Tune in. This is yet another great conversation among experts (not including myself, of course – I need to limit my caffeine intake before E2E’s going forward.