Mark Brown's Web Platform Blog : Mashups

Track Hurricane Gustav with Virtual Earth

mjbrown — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:46:38 GMT

For those that want to get the latest track and wind speed data for Hurricane Gustav and for all active hurricanes go check out our Hurricane Tracker out on MSNBC.COM where they’ve linked to it from their home page.

When you first visit the link the page will draw out the path of the hurricane and land on it’s current position then continue to draw the forecasted path 120 hours out. You can hover over each of the hurricane symbols to get the stats for the recorded including the storm rating, wind speed, location, etc. There’s also a handy histogram on the lower left hand corner that shows wind speeds over time. To check out the other active hurricanes just click the “more” link at the top left.

This is a pretty cool looking map. I kind of like the black background. What do you guys think?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,Hurricane Gustav

Virtual Earth at Cowes Week

mjbrown — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:02:43 GMT

One of our Microsoft partners Inca X is working with the Pelican Racing Team to track it at the Cowes Week Regatta, August 2-9. Cowes is the longest running Regatta in the world, didn’t ya know. The fun gets started this Saturday, 10:00 GMT. That’s 8am for us here in Seattle.

The solution that the Pelican Team is using for this race is the Inca X Live Media GPS. This takes a mobile phone and does live video streaming as well as supplies the GPS coordinates which are then displayed in Microsoft Virtual Earth. Phil Bishop, the CTO for Inca X puts it best…

"Our Live Media GPS application allows anyone to broadcast their current activities directly from a mobile phone. The broadcasts are directly linked to Virtual Earth so that your precise location and movements can be mapped. You can share all this information with your chosen audience, be it public or private.”

If you want to watch the races this week and get both the broadcast media from the boat as well as the Virtual Earth view of where they are on the map check them out here, http://www.ix-m.com/pelican/. The action gets started at 10:00 GMT so us Yanks had better not go have too many beers tonight at the pub.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth

Showing Miami & Virtual Earth at GeoWeb

mjbrown — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 01:12:21 GMT

The nice folks at GeoWeb stopped by my booth at GeoWeb on Thursday asking, how the geoweb can contribute to better planning and management of our cities. Well in fact, there are lots of great examples of State and Local Governments who use Virtual Earth to help in exactly this way. The City of Miami uses Virtual Earth to visualize their parcel, flood and permit data for commercial and other developers to accurately get information. Check it out here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,GeoWeb

Midwest Floods with Virtual Earth Maps on MSNBC.COM

mjbrown — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:07:52 GMT

Virtual Earth is a great tool to visualize the news. It provides information in new and very actionable ways. Chris Pendleton on the Virtual Earth team has a perfect example here with the top story this past week about the terrible floods in the American Mid-West. Read Chris’ post with more information and a link to the story here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,MSNBC.COM,Iowa Floods

State & Local Governments Getting Jiggy with Virtual Earth

mjbrown — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:25:26 GMT

State and Local Governments love mapping stuff. They also create really cool looking websites that their citizens find really useful. Here's a list of some State and Local Governments that are using Virtual Earth and what they are doing with it. To quote my spiritual advisor: actor, singer, dancer, spiritual lama, Will Smith, these SLG's are "Getting Jiggy Wit It".

The Texas Department of Transportation built a really cool site packed full of information. This thing shows EVERYTHING including traffic cameras and even the highway message signs that gives drivers up to date information about road conditions, closures, lane restrictions, etc. They even have the road conditions frequency you tune in on your radio that you can hover over the radio tower and get the information going out over the airwaves.

The Ohio Department of Transportation built a really great looking site. They load the map empty and put a menu on the side where you can optionally select things you want to see and get more information about. I have to say their designers did a really great job with this site. It has a nice clean look to it.

In the Puget Sound region of Washington State, the eCityGov Alliance built an application where users can search, locate, and visualize regional parks and recreational resources. Here's a look at downtown Kirkland, WA. They did a great job. At the upper right corner you can view it near full screen and they took the legend div and floated it as a transparent div in the window. Cool stuff. The funny thing is that the push pins they used look really familiar. I wonder where I've seen those before. Hmm....

The City of Miami has done an incredible implementation of Virtual Earth. They are using it for their zoning and permitting with extensive use of polygons. They even use Virtual Earth 3D to show zoning and property information. That's cool and I'll bet property developers love this feature.

Well there are tons more but that should give you a good idea of how State and Local Governments are doing great work to bring rich and interactive services to their citizens. If you know of others doing similar work for their citizens post it up here. I'd love to see them.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth

Evacuation Planning using Virtual Earth

mjbrown — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:20:42 GMT

Microsoft holds an event every year called Location Summit. It's a two day event where we invite scientists and others who are deep into the mapping technologies to come and share in the research they are doing. I got looped into this thing to cover for a friend of mine who had to present "10 Demos in 10 Minutes" I only got through 9 because... well, let's just say that the internet isn't on all the time. After my session I saw a presentation by a Computer Science Professor at the University of Minnesota named, Shashi Shekhar who had created a new system that determines evacuation plans for cities when emergencies happen such as a terrorist attack or some other disaster that requires lots of people to leave an area quickly.

This new system he designed is called, Capacity Constrained Route Planner (CCRP) and it uses a new system of heuristics that can scale to handle calculations for millions of people. Not only that, the methodology and reducing the total time from a length of time where most die to times where most are saved. From his own words here is below from his Abstract for his research.

Evacuation planning is critical for numerous important applications, e.g. disaster emergency management and homeland defense preparation. Efficient tools are needed to produce evacuation plans that identify routes and schedules to evacuate affected populations to safety in the event of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Current methods are based on linear programming paradigm and suffer from two limitations. First, they may not scale up to large (e.g. 100,000 nodes and 1 Million people) transportation networks in urban scenarios as they use time-expanded networks requiring large amount of computer storage and aim at computing optimal path incurring exorbitant computational costs. Second, they require users to provide an estimate of an upper bound on the total evacuation time. Incorrect estimate may lead to failure of the paradigm.

We present a new heuristic approach, namely Capacity Constrained Route Planner (CCRP), to quickly identify feasible evacuation plan. This method may be used to provide an upper bound on optimal evacuation time for the methods based on linear programming paradigm. Alternatively, our method may be used to determine plausible evacuation plans for very large transportation networks when resource constraints or dynamic conditions make it infeasible or uninteresting to determine the optimal routes. Proposed CCRP approach models has two key ideas. First, it models node/edge attributes as functions of time rather than fixed numbers. Thus node/edge capacities, node occupancies, etc. are modeled as time-series. Second, it iteratively considers all pairs of sources and destinations. In each iteration, it schedules evacuation of a group of evacuees across the closest source-destination pair. Special graphs construction is used eliminate redundant computation in this step. Experiments with real and synthetic transportation networks show that the proposed approach scales up to much larger networks, where software based on linear programming method crashes. For smaller networks, where software based on linear programming can be used, CCRP produces high quality solutions with evacuation times comparable to those achieved by linear programming methods.

Evaluation of our methods for evacuation planning for a disaster at the Monticello nuclear power plant near Minneapolis/St. Paul Twin Cities metropolitan area shows that the new methods lowered evacuation time relative to existing plans by identifying and removing bottlenecks, by providing higher capacities near the destination and by choosing shorter routes. In 2005, CCRP was used for evacuation planning (transportation component) for the Minneapolis-St. Paul twin-cities metropolitan area. It facilitated explorations of scenarios (e.g. alternative locations and times) as well as options (e.g. alternative transportation modes of pedestrian and vehicle). It also led to an interesting discovery that walking able-bodied evacuees (instead of letting them drive) reduces evacuation time significantly for small area (e.g. 1-mile radius) evacuations.

In future work, we plan to formally characterize the quality of solutions identified by the CCRP approach. We will explore new ideas, e.g. phased evacuations and contra-flow, to further reduce evacuation times. In addition, we would like to improve modeling of other transportation modes such as public transportation.

This is actually in use in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area and got covered by the local Fox affiliate TV station Fox 9 in Minneapolis. Here is a clip (apologies for the resolution, will try to get a better one soon). I think its really cool that scientists are using Virtual Earth to do such great work.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Earth,Microsoft

Where is Matt Lauer?

mjbrown — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:03:16 GMT

Chris Pendleton has the scoop that once again NBC likes to send Matt Lauer to the far flung corners on the planet with the latest installment of its, "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" segment. I wonder how many frequent flyer miles he's earned in all those years of doing this segment? Microsoft is in on this too as we launched a new game out on Live Search Club called, Discover the World with Matt Lauer."

Personally, I need this myself so that my family knows where I am. Actually, the other day when I was down in SF for Web 2.0 I forgot what city I was in for a second so I can probably use this too. Meh, actually I'm not as cool as Matt here. I suppose for my purposes a LoJack would work fine for me.

I never would have thought of this

mjbrown — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:15:12 GMT

As I've only been working on the Virtual Earth team now for about 12 weeks or so, I am constantly surprised about how our customers use Virtual Earth in ways I never could have dreamed of. Here's another great example of this. A company called, Sungevity is using the aerial imagery of Virtual Earth to calculate the savings you would get by installing solar panels on your house. They employ a trigonometry heavy calculation that leverages our imagery and of course, your location to figure it all out.

I first heard of this when I bumped into a friend, Scott Stanfield from Vertigo whom I bumped into at NAB last week who resides here in the Bay Area where I am now for Web 2.0, but I got the deep scoop from Steve Lombardi's blog who saw this out on Webware. According to their article: The company's secret sauce is a trigonometry-heavy application that can take satellite imagery and create a 3D model of a house. From the model, Sungevity calculates the pitch of the roof, the azimuth (for instance, where the house faces in relation to compass points) and the available area. AWESOME.

Check it out. I plugged in my old house in Laguna Beach to see what I could have been saving. Unfortunately they don't service Laguna Beach yet, but since I live in Seattle now anyway I'm not too bummed.

Technorati Tags: solar power,Virtual Earth