Slashgeo

We warned our readers about some geonews being published at a slower rate than usual but claimed that you won't miss anything major. Here's Microsoft geonews wrap-up for February. Let's start with the big data update announced this week with new birds eye and 3D cities in Virtual Earth, including significant additions in Portugal, Italy, and Austria. There was also a data update in January detailed here. Here's more on the upcoming World Wide Telescope (WWT), dubbed by many as Microsoft's answer to Google Sky (previously this month). Here's a demonstration of the video recording function over new VE 3D buildings in Paris. Here's a video including Jack Dangermond on the ESRI-Microsoft partnership. There's also two important customers migrating to the Virtual Earth platform: YellowBook and Windermere. There's also a way to show Google My Maps data in Virtual Earth (via OE). APB links to an analysis of the local component of the possible Microsoft-Yahoo! merger. Several other Microsoft-related geonews were shared recently.

Yahoo! Local and Maps Blog announces a major update to their Yahoo! Maps page. The new version has, "... a number of improvements including; new neighborhood data, expanded worldwide coverage, and stylistic improvements." See the Yahoo! post for more details on the improvements.

Here's a few recent Apple related geonews. First is the capacity for Mac owners to run Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D using the new VMWare Fusion: "Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D doesn’t yet run in a Mac OS X browser. Until recently, your only option was to install a copy of Windows on a different partition using Apple’s Bootcamp tool, and boot into it. [...] Sometime in the last few months, however, competitor VMWare came out with an update of their virtualization tool for Mac, Fusion, that does support VE3D." Additionally, The Map Room shares a complete guide to geotagging photos on the Mac. And finally, APB informs us Apple is encouraging iPhone users to help update the Skyhook wifi location database. On a side note, mentioning Apple products looks reasonable since they are increasingly popular even within geospatial professional, with now 14% of computer sold last February and almost a monopoly on portable music devices. Related previous stories added below, including an old one on running ArcGIS on MacOS X, but I admit omitting the numerous previous stories on geotagging photos.

Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog posts about this big Virtual Earth update. It's tons of data (40tb), and this includes Birdseye and Ortho photos. To see the full list, please visit the blogs link. It's also very nice to see that the coverage is starting to expand heavily over seas (not just the US). Virtual Earth seems to be gaining a lot of traction.

The Google Earth Blog brings us news of this pretty impressive Virtual Earth 3D update. The screenshots alone should tell the story, so please head on over there for more information. As if the pics on the Google Earth Blog weren't amazing enough, they also let us know about this blog which also sports pretty amazing pics showing before and after. Update: 04/11 15:11 GMT by S : This is indeed a major update, here's the list of new items from the GEB: Improved 3D buildings, Export to KML, 3D Modeling Improved Also, Bird's Eye Enhanced, MapCruncher integration (see also SA on MapCruncher), Explore Collections, Movie Capture, Real-time Traffic, Improved KML Support. Additionally, Mapperz offers a list of improvements for the new Virtual Earth API version 6.1. For VE enthusiasts, a Slashgeo reader named Eric submitted the MapForums VE blogs monitor page.