This week Bing Maps and Microsoft Research will be heading to San Jose to attend O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, architect of Bing Maps will kick off the event keynote at 9am and will also take part in “The Big Picture, from the Big Players” panel at 2pm alongside Danny Sullivan and folks from Yahoo!, Google and Yelp. If you can’t make it to the keynote, the speech will be live streamed and all content will be available on YouTube following the event.
In the meantime, here are a few highlights of what’s new and coming from Bing Maps:
New apps: Just about every month, Bing Maps gets a makeover in the form of new map imagery for locations worldwide. The Bing Maps World Tour, available in the Bing Maps app gallery today, brings these updates to life using the Bing Map Apps framework, Silverlight and Azure. Read more from our Bing Maps evangelist here.
New apps coming soon: Oodle.com, one of the fastest growing classifieds services is creating an app that will map rental housing on Bing Maps. The Oodle Rentals app will pull-in Oodle data, allowing users to look at various rental housing available from Oodle.com. The app will begin rolling out later today. Read more from our Bing Maps evangelist here.
App update: Last week at SES New York, we announced our partnership with foursquare and plans to roll out the foursquare Everywhere app on Bing Maps. Today, we’re excited to say that the updated app is rolling out broadly and will also be ready for use later today. Read more from our Bing Maps evangelist here.
Bing Maps Event Presence:
The Maps as an Information Ecology
Date: Wednesday, March 31 @ 9am PT
Presenter: Blaise Aguera y Arcas
Summary: When mapping first arrived on the web, it was all about driving directions. In the era of the mashup, we saw map tiles being used as canvas for a variety of websites devoted to data visualization and interaction. Around the same time, maps arrived in force on mobile devices, they began to include visualization at human scale, and we began to see an increase in user-generated and crowd sourced maps. At Bing, we’ve been evolving to meet and accelerate the trajectory of these shifts, in the process enabling a broad sweep of new applications written by anyone, using data from anywhere. The Magical Realist writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map that grew as large as life; in a very real sense, this is what is happening today.
The Big Picture, from the Big Players
Date: Wednesday, March 31 @ 2pm PT
Presenters:
· Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
· Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Bing Maps
· Tom Wailes, Y!
· John Hanke, Google
· Dylan Swift, Yelp
Summary: Where’s local search heading? In this session, representatives from the major search engines discuss the state of where we are and where things are going in the future.
You can check out the full conference schedule here
For more from the Bing maps team make sure to follow them on twitter @bingmaps or check out all the latest on the Bing Maps blog.
Thanks,
Kristin Meldahl