geo2web.com

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If you’ve ever been on Live Search Maps, there’s a good chance you’ve seen some of the advertisements we display on the site. I figured it was time to dive a little deeper into the opportunities that are available to you as a Virtual Earth platform customer (or if you’d like to be one) to increase your reach across our Microsoft mapping properties. There are 3 advisement types that you’ll find on the Live Search Maps site, but only one of which we’re taking orders for via the Virtual Earth platform licensing group - Highlighted Listings (the other two being Sponsored Listings and Brand Finder are described below, but just for informational purposes). To advertise on Live Search Maps via the Highlighted Listings program send mail to the Virtual Earth Licensing alias (or, yes, you can always email me).

Highlighted Listings
Highlighted Listings allows for additional exposure of your brand through Live Search Maps without tampering with our algorithm to produce the most relevant user results. For example, if you do a search for “Hotels In San Diego, CA” on Live Search Maps you’ll get a result set consisting of hotels in the San Diego area; however, the difference is for every Choice Hotels (a subscriber to the Highlighted Listings program) location there’s a branded icon for the respective hotel (e.g. Comfort Inns, have the Comfort Inn logo, etc). These logos appear in the result list on the left, in the enhanced roll over and right on the map! As you can see the logos really *POP* on the map versus our rather, eh-hem, mundane orange pushpins. Also as a part of the Highlighted Listings program, the links in the enhanced rollover are clickable and will redirect to a URL of your choosing for each location. That means for each of your locations, you can have the link redirect the user to the exact physical location’s web page. So, in the hospitality scenario, you can have the link for each hotel location link to the booking page for that respective hotel. This pushes the user one step closer to booking the hotel.

The program has been hugely successful and I’m sure the current members of the program will be reading this with chagrin since I’m letting their secret out. Also, you can package this with your Virtual Earth licensing agreement. If you’re a current customer (or not a customer, but what to be one) you can sign up for Highlighted Listings and at the same time use Virtual Earth’s API for your applications! It’s a great user experience to be redirected from our Live Search Maps consumer site to a site that’s using the same map interface they just left. Again, to advertise on Live Search Maps via the Highlighted Listings program send mail to the Virtual Earth Licensing alias.

For informational purposes I’ve described Sponsored Listings and Brand Finder below.

Sponsored Listings
The simplest advertising we have on Live Search Maps is Sponsored Listings from Yellow Pages.com. Once you get on their ad platform, you will just appear on Live Search Maps in the text-based ads. Pretty straightforward.

Brand Finder
Brand Finder is what we call “discoverable” advertising which means it’s always on regardless of your search. For example, if you search for “Banks in San Diego” the Brand Finder icons will be on even though your query may not relate to banking. In the screenshot below, I’m showing the hotel icons - also, licensed by Choice Hotels. Notice the icons on the map are more generic (a hotel icon) and not a branded icon; however, the brand does appear in the enhanced rollover. Brand Finder is something we’re still tinkering around with, but haven’t launched any kind of full scale business model around.

Make your brand pop.

CP

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Nathania Johnson at Search Engine Watch did due diligence and queried Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, Ask and AOL and found that Microsoft has the most information and can geocode key cities like Ts’khinvali.

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The movie below would be easy to dismiss as vaporware if it were not for the link to Brad Greenspan, co-founder of MySpace.co. As such it is possibly a first glimpse of a new age of graphics and virtual worlds rendered not on the clients machine but on remote servers in The Cloud.

Cloud based computing is currently taking over systems ranging from email to word processing and graphics packages with a number of big players offering Cloud based services. It is a logical leap to take the concept of social networks and virtual environments along the lines of Second Life and move the processing to a remote server farm. Logical it maybe but technically we are amazed and to be honest more than a little skeptical.

There is a lot of hype on this one, the original movie was pulled and then rehosted by Tech Crunch. Regardless of the authoritativeness of the movie any ability to render graphics in The Cloud is something to undoubtedly look forward to, especially if those city graphics are real…

Thanks go to Sean for the heads up on the post over at Tech Crunch.

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Geowake Marina

Geowake Marina is a nautical mapping service that let’s you display nav-aids and much more on your website - including buoys, lights, beacons, markers, and NOAA charts. For example, National Harbor Marina a five-star luxury resort marina located near Washington, DC hired Geowake LLC to create an interactive map for boaters travelling to the new marina.

The Google Map that Geowake created contains a number of selectable map layers. It is therefore possible to view the location of navigation aids, to view an approach chart and/or to get weather and tide information. The map is obviously a great aid for anyone planning to sail in the Marina.

DockMarket

DockMarket is a Google Maps real-estate mash-up, only this time the real-estate are not houses but boat slips. I think this is a great idea for a Google Maps mash-up. As DockMarket says itself, boaters know maps and I know a number of boaters are like me and always on the look out for cheaper and better placed moorings.

The map itself is very easy to use. You just type in a location in the search box and DockMarket searches for available boat slips near by. Of course you can use DockMarket not only to find boat slips but to list a slip for sale as well.

Google Gadgets for Tides
Jennifer Pells has a Google Map on her website that shows the tide timetables for what seems like most of the US coastline.

Each location that has a timetable is tagged on the map. The information window of each tag displays a Google Gadget of the tide timetable for that location. It is therefore possible to check the tides at each location and/or add the Google Gadget from that tag to your iGoogle page.

Dave Wilkie Train and Ship Photographs
This Google Maps mash-up presents a gallery of photographs, mostly taken by the late Dave Wilkie. The different photographs can be accessed by their tags on the map or it is possible to just flick through the collection using forward and back buttons.

The attraction of this mash-up is, of course, the amazing photography on show.

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Yahoo has just launched their entry into the growing world of “track your location” sites with the release of Fire Eagle.

The basic idea behind Fire Eagle is to become the link between your location and the services that you want to give your location to. You can feed your location to Fire Eagle from your GPS unit, cell phone, laptop, etc, then their applications can use it for whatever task you give them permission for.

Even though it has just launched, there are a large number of sites already using it, many of which tie into Google Maps. Google Maps Mania summarizes six of them, and others include major players such as Dash and Brightkite. There’s even a plug-in available for Movable Type, which powers this blog. Wouldn’t it be neat to see where Frank is right now?

I think the key to an application like this will be the mobile offerings they unveil. For example, the iPhone already has a slew of location-aware apps, none of which (as far as I know) feed data directly back into Fire Eagle. A free Fire Eagle app on the iPhone would provide a quick way for a few million more users to update their location.

All in all, it seems like a solid entry for Yahoo. The reviews around the web (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc) have been quite positive. If you are a heavy user of location-aware services, I can see this being a great tool. If you’re not, though, will it be enough to get you going?

Mickey

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