What Is Virtual Earth? The Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services that combines unique bird's eye, aerial, and 3D imagery with best-of-breed mapping, location and search functionality. With ongoing investments in innovation that are driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform continues to offer new tools, advanced feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities. In this latest release, the new Virtual Earth Platform is even more flexible, providing a wider range of supported capabilities that allow your business to strengthen customer relationships with innovative solutions and breakthrough experiences. By combining comprehensive support for feature customization, richer features for end users, and new levels of control and flexibility in the platform, Virtual Earth allows you to create unique environments to connect with your customers. The Virtual Earth platform has become the best solution available on the market for businesses and government customers. Fig 1. 3D Visualisation Fig 2.  Custom pushpin popups The Virtual Earth Platform enables businesses to easily and cost-effectively customise unique location experiences for end customers. By providing multiple tools and greater control to change the way location solutions can be developed, businesses can continuously provide and update their online experience to ensure they remain competitive. Add bird's eye or 3D imagery to real estate applications to show prospective clients, enhance your store locator with the dynamic, drag-n-drop maps, or provide your fleet drivers with highly-visual driving directions. The possibilities are endless. The Virtual Earth platform powers a variety of consumer, enterprise and government applications that enable people to learn about, discover and explore a specific location. Virtual Earth powers Windows Live Local, Microsoft's online local search and mapping web site. You can use this same power to create a unique application to showcase your business. Take your websites and applications to the next level by creating an immersive online mapping and visualization experience with the Virtual Earth platform. If your application is stuck with flat, boring maps, contact us and we'll help you migrate. Key features of the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform are: Enhanced Intelligence Features Geo-specific, photo-realistic 3D renderings of urban environments and digital elevation models allow users to explore locations and study objects of interest from all perspective and vantage points. Rich earth imagery provides unmatched clarity and insight for analyzing business intelligence data within the context of location. Virtual Earth-based solutions provide a big picture view of assets and other data at a glance; users can then drill down on points of interest for more detailed information relevant to those locations. Integrate real-time data from web sources such as weather, traffic and video. Quickly locate and discover points of interests and other critical information and then disseminate that mission critical information to customers. Easily view data in 2D format and then instantly toggle that view to 3D. Improved Data Sharing Features Access applications through a web browser. Visualize multiple-source, multiple-format data through decision support portals. Extend existing investments in ESRI & MapInfo—traditional “heavy GIS” systems by incorporating existing spatial data into a Virtual Earth environment.  Easy to develop and deploy a Virtual Earth powered application—requires no GIS experience or special software to deploy or license individually to your user base. No need to convert your data into proprietary data formats. Microsoft Virtual Earth supports open standards. “Software Assurance” is included. Microsoft-supplied data and content updates are automatically delivered to your application through the Virtual Earth API, as it becomes available. Naturally integrates and extends your existing IT investment. Improved Efficiency Features Common and robust set of standards-based APIs provide a universal platform for developers, helping to reduce application development and deployment time. Enterprise-ready dissemination of data through portals supports increased analysis and response times. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) allows customers to focus on their core mission, freeing them from the requirement of managing and updating GIS hardware and software simply to include current mapping data within decision support portals and citizen facing websites. No investments in GIS hardware, maps or imagery databases required. Your application can even incorporate your own mapping, imagery and point of interest (POI) data seamlessly and easily. No maintenance of mapping and data sets necessary— Microsoft keeps it current for you.