Mark Brown's Web Platform Blog : Mobile

Find Developer Events Using Virtual Earth

mjbrown — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:09:19 GMT

One of my friends at Microsoft, Glen Gordon in our US Developer and Platform Evangelism Team (DPE) turned me on to something really cool they just did. If you didn’t know these guys are constant road warriors presenting at events across the US. They just created a new website called, Community Megaphone that has a complete listing of all upcoming Developer Events across the US. It’s got some nice features such as allowing you to add events to your Outlook Calendar, but the BEST FEATURE is the ability to get a map of the location using Virtual Earth.

And if that wasn’t enough they went a step further. They also went and built and RSS Feed that includes GeoRSS. This allows anybody to import the feed into Live Maps Collection. He didn’t stop there though. This gets even cooler because with the data in GeoRSS and if you have one of these new Windows Mobile phones that has a GPS built into it you can now use your phone to see if there are any Developer Events close to you. Here’s a little screen shot of what it looks like on the phone but check out his post for all the details on how you can do this too.

Enjoy

Call 411 for Maps

mjbrown — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:10:26 GMT

It’s kind of funny but things happen in waves don’t they? For instance the subject of Google’s 411 service has been cropping up on me constantly for the last week. People tell me, “Oooo, Google, they are so smart over there with their 411 thing” or “Ahhh, wow that is cool. Those Google guys are real innovators over there. Its too bad Microsoft can’t do this”.

Riiiiiiight….

I’m dead serious, people talk to me that way. Actually, we do have 411 as well. In fact, I would dare say that ours might be better than Google’s. <ducks> No really. Here’s a list of features.

Search by business name or type of business. You can even narrow your search by neighborhood.
Get maps and directions sent directly to your phone. You can also get traffic too.
Get the current and forecasted weather.
Get movie listings and even have the service tell you if there are still tickets, then connect you.
Share listings with friends so you both have directions on where you are meeting up.

Pretty cool stuff. So check it out. +1-800-CALL-411. You can also check out their web page to hear a demo at http://www.livesearch411.com/

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth

Virtual Earth at PDC

mjbrown — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:40:22 GMT

This year’s PDC will have a session on Virtual Earth. We have a big release coming up this Fall and I plan on giving an in depth look at it for those interested in building location aware applications. This session will be ~90% demos and code to give you all a leg up on getting started with all the new stuff. I am really excited by this new release so if you are coming to PDC check out my session.

Live Platform: Deep Dive on Microsoft Virtual Earth

Learn about the next major release of Virtual Earth. Come see the improvements to our parsing and geo-coding engines, clustering, localization, and routing. Hear how the new Virtual Earth Web Services provide server-side support for building location-based applications on desktops and mobile devices.

See you there.

Find the Best Gas Prices Using Mobile Live Search

mjbrown — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:47:17 GMT

I just came across this feature when I updated the Mobile Live Search client on my Windows Mobile phone. There now is a feature which allows you to find the lowest gas prices in your area. If you have a GPS enabled phone this feature is even easier to use. Currently the Mobile Live Search application is supported across a number of Windows Mobile versions in the US and UK and a beta version for Blackberry 4.0 and above in the US only. You can get the download here, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/livesearch/default.mspx

Happy motoring.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows Mobile,Live Maps,Virtual Earth