First up is the AGI’s GeoCommunity conference.

Not many people are aware on how much the conference has changed in the last 3 years. Historically it was based on a large Exhibition with a smaller conference format (Birmingham NEC and Earls Court days). While it was a good format for those days, over the years delegate numbers have declined. Under the leadership of the current Chairman Steve Feldman, it has been completely overhauled and now the focus is on the conference with a smaller exhibition.

Last year the conference attracted over 600 delegates who participated in more than 50 workshops, presentations and debates. This year, the conference is taking a further step forward and will unite the traditional GIS industry with the Neogeography geo community with the help of Christopher Osborne the founder of the London based #Geomob meetup group. You will also see a presence from Microsoft Virtual Earth and Andrew Turner, a well known Neogeography Evangelist will be the first plenary speaker.

The conference is a two day event in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and with early bird prices of £275 (Member) or £355 (non member) including accommodation, it’s extremely good value for money. If you want to present a paper or workshop, you can get it even cheaper.

The Call for papers closes this Friday May 1st, so jump in there!

Follow GeoCommunity at http://twitter.com/GeoCommunity
Join the GeoCommunity discussion on LinkedIn at http://twurl.nl/lrf4lh

Second up is the OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference. Multimap has supported the OpenStreetMap movement in the past, sponsoring them on several occasions.  Members use the GPS capability of mobile phones and aerial imagery, to create their own map of the world. The maps they create are available for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap community wants everyone to take part and they recently passed 100,000 mappers.

There is something in OpenStreetMap for everyone. Walkers, runners and cyclists can add running trails, footpaths and cycle routes to the map. Once you’ve been mapping a few times it becomes part of your hobby. The map below shows cycle paths in central Berlin.

The conference is in Amsterdam, from the 10th - 11th July 2009. The conference will feature three days of talks and is not to be missed by anyone interested in joining OpenStreetMap’s mapping project. Weekend tickets cost just €100 - and until Sunday 29th March you can get your ticket at a special early bird rate of €75.

The call for presentations closes this Sunday on the 3rd May 2009, and you can find out more about the event here.

For many people, the simple style of maps that sites such as multimap.com offer work best for them, particularly when driving.

We are also frequently reminded by you however, that there are many other purposes for a using a map, rather than just driving. Anyone who loves things such as walking, cycling, climbing, camping, surfing and fishing in the UK, will know that nothing beats an Ordnance Survey map.

Multimap.com has offered the popular 1:50k Landranger maps as an alternative map style for some time, and I’m really pleased to announce the addition of the popular 1:25k Explorer maps on Multimap.com that add even more detail, depth and accuracy.

Some users also mentioned they had trouble finding OS maps on Multimap.com, so we’ve added a new ‘OS map’ button right between the existing map and aerial buttons, so that you can easily switch on OS maps when they are available.

You can even embed OS maps into your own blog or website, using our embedded maps feature. Simply find the map you want to embed, click the link button, accept the T&C’s and you can then simply copy and paste the HTML code into your page.

And finally, OS Explorer maps have also been added to the Multimap API.

Enjoy!

• The famous Ordnance Survey Land Ranger map of Great Britain (as mentioned by Mary Spence)
• Collins Bartholomew London street maps
• Malaysia street maps by local Malaysian cartographers Navi&Map
• ..and many more to come!

That said, there is nothing wrong with our standard maps too, having a simple “base map” enables our users and customers to overlay their own content that is relevant to their needs. After all, one of the principal elements of cartographic design is a map “must be designed foremost with consideration to the audience and its needs” (Robinson, A.H,1953). There is not one size that fits all for our users. Online map users have many diverse needs, and in the last few years have become extremely educated in the use of online mapping sites and personal navigation devices. This means that online map providers like ourselves have had to be flexible, offering choice.

So if you are planning a holiday to the Lake District, please try our Ordnance Survey Land Ranger maps or if you are planning a city break you might want our standard maps with some landmarks and perhaps even some Bird’s Eye imagery, or if you simply want a map of wi-fi hot spots in Paris, then please take one. The choice is yours!

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that we released maps of many new areas over the weekend on Multimap.com. We’ve combined our street level maps in Europe, with maps from Microsoft Virtual Earth that provide you with improved country and region level maps worldwide and new street level coverage of including…

Asia - Japan
Africa - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, South Africa
Eastern Europe -Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia
Central and South America - Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile

These new maps are available on Multimap.com today, and will be available via our Multimap API for business customers and Open API for developers over the next few weeks.

Our friends on the Microsoft Virtual Earth team have also just delivered another 20TB of Aerial and Bird’s Eye images, which also includes some new UK imagery. A big thank you to them all!!

Enjoy!!

• High Resolution Aerial and Bird’s Eye from Microsoft Virtual Earth - All the great imagery that you see on Multimap.com is now available in the Open API.
• Local Information - As well as offering direct access to geocoding, routing, and static map services through our web services API, we have today added the ability to directly query our local information databases through the same REST style interface. This will enable you to mash data such as cash points, transport links, wi-fi hotspots and Wikipedia articles into your applications. Special thanks go to TeleAtlas and TotalHotspots for helping to make this happen.

In the last week or so, many of you told us that you have wanted to build mash-ups with data stored in OSGB x/y co-ordinates and grid references that are tricky to use with mapping API’s such as the Open API (which only tend to support WGS84 co-ordinates). To help make this easier, we’re making available a beta feature that allows you transform these co-ordinates so that you can place them onto our maps. We’ve put it together so quickly, that we haven’t had chance to finish to documentation for it, but Richard’s blog has much more.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to smarten up the sign-up process to make it more straightforward to get an API key. Existing Open API users will need to go back to the sign-up page and update your API key to get access to the new features.

For those of you going to Mashed, we’ve created a cheat sheet that has links to all the Multimap and Microsoft tools you can use, along with code snippets and links to tools and libraries that others have built.

The final batch of tickets has been released, but you’ll need to be quick as the tickets we released went in a few hours.

There will be a bunch of us wandering around at Mashed all weekend wearing Multimap t-shirts, and hopefully we’ll camp out in a corner armed with beanbags and Xbox’s, so come over and say hello.

See you there!!

With England spectacularly failing to quality, it’s down to the Multimap Istanbul office to get behind their national team (although we do have an English-born player ourselves!!!).

Everyone here in Turkey is getting very excited, and I have big hopes for local player Nihat Kahveci, who scored the winning goal to get us to the Championships.

There’s just the small matter of beating many peoples favourites Portugal at the Stade de Genève, followed by the host’s Switzerland (in front of packed home crowd in Basel), and then back to Geneva to meet the always dangerous Czech Republic, who beat the favourites Germany 3-0 on their way to qualifying!!! So no pressure then!?…

It all culminates with the Final at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium on June 29th.

Haydi Turkiye!!!!

So, the important bit. We have 100 tickets now available here. You’ll need the code, which is “microsoft”.

If you miss out, keep watching because more tickets will be released over the coming weeks. Hope to see you there.

Today heralds the start of another chapter at Multimap as we retire the ‘old’ site and move forward to embrace the next era of online mapping.

The end of an era always brings with it some reflection and, when I was thinking about what to write in this blog, I couldn’t help getting nostalgic. The ‘old’ site was once our ‘new’ site too and ran for several years generating enormous user growth due to its great features. It too, was replacing an ‘old’ site (an ‘old, old’ site if you like) and, in fact that site (the ‘old, old’ one) was replacing the original prototype that Sean, our founder, quite literally wrote in his spare room!

That was in 2000, and I was Multimap’s second employee who had joined in December of the previous year (in case you are wondering, Employee #1 - Karl - is still with Multimap). Looking at www.archive.org at a snapshot of the site back then, what stands out for me is the “nostalgic for the old site” link, which took you back to the original prototype. Even in those very early days we were mindful of our users’ feelings and respectful of the time that you invested in us. It would be foolish therefore not to build upon the legacy of the old site, bringing along all that is good about it as we continue to move forwards.

Just as we did 8 years ago, we’ve spent the last year listening to our customers and their feedback on what they like about our new site and what they preferred about the old. We hope we have incorporated the best of that feedback and addressed most of those concerns in the last year, and that the features of the new site represent a positive step for you.

In particular, we have focused on making the site simpler to use, and worked to improve many of the tools and features.

We have also remained true to our goal of leaving no users behind by trying to offer everyone the most usable service, especially for those using older computers and low-bandwidth Internet connections, such as dial-up. Back in April we quietly released a new ‘basic‘ version which hopefully offers the best of both worlds: many of the new and exciting features of the new site, larger maps and your choice of map styles, but with the ability to support older computers and users who do not have broadband. Since its release, the ‘basic’ version has been well received, so we’d like to talk a little bit more about it…

The ‘basic’ site has all of the maps you tell us you prefer, from the well-known Harper Collins street atlases to Ordnance Survey Landranger maps (if you don’t see the map you prefer, click on the arrow to the right of the “map” button on the map itself and you’ll see a list of available map types). The ‘basic’ site is just another view of our new site, which means that you can share links from it with your friends and family irrespective of whether they use the ‘basic’ or the ‘interactive’ version of the site. You can see the ‘basic‘ version by visiting the new site and clicking on the ‘basic maps’ link above the map. To return to the ‘interactive‘ version, just click ‘interactive maps’, which is also above the map.

We’ve also made other performance improvements, which has included changes to how we display content from our advertising partners.

By closely listening to our users, and responding accordingly, we have seen a steady migration of users from the old site to the new over the past year, just as they did in 2000. Visits to the old site have now dropped to levels where we feel the time is right to invest all our energy into our new site.

For those of you who haven’t yet tried out the new site, then allow us to highlight just some of the new features you might find useful:

Draggable Maps and Aerial Images

No more waiting for the page to load when you want to move the map with our ‘interactive’ version - just use your cursor to “grab” the map and “drag” it. Want to zoom in? Simple, just double-click the map or use the zoom control in the top-right-hand corner of the map. Click the ‘Aerial’ button to view fantastically detailed aerial images, courtesy of Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Bird’s Eye

Bird’s Eye images let you see the world from a unique new perspective. They are taken from low-flying aircraft with 4 high-resolution cameras facing north, south, east and west, which means that, in addition to the top-down aerial view, you can view buildings at a 45-degree angle from 4 directions. Bird’s Eye images are available on our ‘interactive’ version for many major cities around the world – and we’re adding new locations every month. John has also written an excellent blog about it.

Local Information

Explore your location before you travel. Use the “Useful Information” palette on our ‘interactive version’ to display cashpoints, railway stations, car parks and even Wikipedia articles on our maps.

Find a business

Now you can use our maps to find businesses in your area – or your destination. We’ve got details of everyone from accountants to woodworkers in the UK, US, Canada, France and Italy – with other countries coming soon.

Improved travel directions

We now offer you walking directions as well as driving directions; the ability to route between points of interest, as well as between addresses; and directions for even more countries. We also give separate maps for the start and end points as well as for your full journey.

For all those who embrace change and enjoy discovering new features and content, we know there are those who find these kinds of changes harder to accept, and we’re completely realistic that not all users may be happy with this change.

All we can ask is that you give our new site a chance, and keep talking to us, whatever your feedback.

You can drop us a line at: info@multimap.com

Back in 2000 we added Aerial imagery to our maps, a revolutionary feature that allowed users to view the world from a completely different perspective. Sometimes referred to as “orthorectified imagery”, aerial images are taken from commercial satellites and, for the most detailed images, from aircraft with very high resolution cameras pointing straight down. Images are examined for defects such as cloud cover, colour balanced and then carefully aligned with reference points on the ground to produce a seamless set of images. Multimap uses Aerial images from many suppliers, all around the world.

As you can see from this picture of Norwich Cathedral, our aerial images provide a fabulous level of detail, and are easy to navigate especially when road labels are also switched on

In 2005, Microsoft took this a step further and launched Bird’s Eye imagery in 2005 on Live Search Maps. Bird’s Eye images are unique in that they are taken from low-flying aircraft with 4 high resolution cameras facing north, south, east and west. This means that, in addition to the top down view, you can view buildings at a 45 degree angle from 4 directions.

So if we go back to Norwich Cathedral, but this time in Bird’s Eye mode, we can see it from a unique perspective, and get a real feeling for the shape of the building, as well as the detail.

If you are interested in how this imagery is captured, have a look at this 3 minute video from five’s “Gadget Show”.

The Virtual Earth team are hard at work processing multi-terabytes of this data received from local suppliers, increasing the coverage, especially here in the UK. Last month saw a massive update, with new Bird’s Eye images in places such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Chris Pendletons blog has lots more information, or just visit Multimap.com and see if the Birds Eye map button is available in your area.

So I leave it to you, go have fun and explore.

Short story: today we implemented the plans we described then.

Longer story:

More than 45% of the UK mapping audience works with Multimap, and we’re committed to Multimap as our mapping and local search site in the UK, with all the investment of time and technology that that means.

Today, if you use mapping through MSN UK or Live.com, you’ll be using Multimap, and have access to local map styles for your area, Bird’s Eye and aerial imagery, local points of interest (from Wi-fi to Wikipedia) the UK’s #1 routing service , a global reach (with new maps of China, new Bird’s Eye in Australia) and more.

While we have already brought some key elements of maps.live.com into the Multimap site (Bird’s Eye and high-resolution aerial imagery, for example), there is more to come. We will continue to offer users a choice until we have fully integrated the extra features, like Collections and 3-D.

We have links back to maps.live.com from Multimap for users who prefer to go in that direction today.

If you develop with, or your business uses, the Virtual Earth platform, rest assured that this does not affect you. We continue to invest in both products and expect to offer an expanded set of opportunities and features over time.

If you develop with, or your business uses, the Multimap platform, you now have access to Bird’s Eye, high-resolution aerial imagery and greater international coverage than ever before.

Thanks to all of your support and robust challenges over recent weeks, please continue to make yourselves heard.