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Microsoft Acquires Multimap
posted by Satri
on Wednesday December 12, @02:15PM
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from the winning-the-buy-me-game dept.
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from the winning-the-buy-me-game dept.
redgeographics writes "More acquisitions: Microsoft Corp. has acquired Multimap, one of the United Kingdom’s top 100 technology companies and one of the leading online mapping services in the world. The acquisition gives Microsoft a powerful new location and mapping technology to complement existing offerings such as Virtual Earth, Live Search, Windows Live services, MSN and the aQuantive advertising platform, with future integration potential for a range of other Microsoft products and platforms. Terms of the deal were not disclosed." SA and APB adds links to a TimesOnline article and a Guardian article.
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Webmapping API Licenses and Data Access 2 comments
[+]
All Points Blog offers an clear and to-the-point entry on the relationship between data and API licenses for webmapping apps, specifically Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! data into other webmapping apps such as OpenLayers. Meanwhile, The Earth is Square wonders if a workaround could revive a NASA World Wind plugin to access Google Maps data. From APB: "I had in my head that somehow OpenLayers was "doing something wrong" since it could pull in data sets from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MultiMap into its own interface (go play with that!). With quite a bit of patience Frank explained that OpenLayer is doing everything correctly. It has an API key for each of the API providers (if needed) and follows all the rules of the license. So, how is this different from the Gaia team noted above that got shut down? That group was accessing the data directly from Google servers and not, as stipulated in the license, via Google software. (Google Earth has no API like Google Maps does.) Frank even showed me the code where OpenLayers dutifully uses its API key to pull in tiles from Google Maps. Google, he noted, even contacted the MetaCarta team to ask if there was any thing needed to further their implementation!"
Technology: Aerial Imagery for the Entire U.K. 3 comments
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Mapperz tells us 192.com offers high resolution aerial imagery for the whole U.K.. From the blog: "The main advantage with this is that the aerial imagery is constant across the UK.
Google Maps, Microsoft Live Local, Multimap mapping has patchy areas that are poor resolution in places."
Application Domains: Geolocated Advertising with Mappam Launches 1 comment
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SteveC writes "Mappam, a geo-targeted advertising broker has launched. The basic idea is that you can put little ads on your maps rather than the traditional sidebar. Takes less space and is more targeted to what you're looking at on the map. It's API-agnostic, be it google, yahoo, virtual earth, multimap or openstreetmap. We've started with some great partners including plazes, nestoria, google sightseeing, tagzania and of course OpenStreetMap."
Technology: Mapstraction Adds Support for OpenLayers
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The High Earth Orbit blog informs us Mapstraction now supports OpenLayers. What's Mapstraction? From this previous story: "Mapstraction is a library which provides a common API for Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible." From the HEO entry: "Why wrap one wrapper in another?
At conferences and get togethers, the devs and users of Mapstraction and OpenLayers frequently ask the question “What’s the difference between Mapstraction and OpenLayers?”
The primary distinction between the libraries is a difference in objective. Mapstraction seeks to provide a simple wrapper to meet the primary needs of a mapping user. The purpose being to make it easy for a user to read a single API and then easily switch to any of the major providers. [...] With this new support, it now brings Mapstraction up to 9 supported map interfaces (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Map24, MultiMap, MapQuest, FreeEarth, OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap)."
Virtual Earth support for SQL Server 2008
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Flat Out GIS has an article about this speculation. Here is there summary : "I’m comparing Google Maps versus Virtual Earth right now, and one of the deciding factors is spatial data support. With the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 spatial support, will VE be able to read these new WKB and WKT types natively? I saw a news release from Microsoft indicating several partners have developed this capability for their products, but was looking for information on whether or not it will become part of the VE api. It would be a plus if VE could read SQL Server geometry and render them automatically without additional coding."
To get the link to the actual microsoft release, head on over to Flat Out GIS.
To get the link to the actual microsoft release, head on over to Flat Out GIS.
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Multimap's founder interview
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