This morning’s news [SearchEngineLand | Chris P Blog] that Ask.com’s maps and directions site has migrated from an application built on deCarta’s

(formerly Telcontar) mapping platform to Virtual Earth got me wondering about the future of self hosting of mapping infrastructure for high volume sites. The question isn’t if there is a future here at all, there is. In fact the Virtual Earth appliance



is offered to our customers with really specialized needs (off the grid or lots of custom pre-rendered data are a couple of good cases)  My question is how big this already niche market will become.

If your web based map app calls for supreme control and customization of cartography you historically would build your own cluster around ESRI’s universe of software and get to coding. For small to mid sized apps this was OK assuming you could make the development investment, but it broke down when scaling forced you to build out that cluster. this is where hosted solutions like Virtual Earth come in – you trade off a level of control (you don’t like our highway shields? sorry) for infinite scalability and performance.  Both are viable models for building your app and you could go with whichever worked for you. But Telcontar was offering a third option that always seemed to me to be the worst of both worlds – the limited control of hosted with all of the hosting and maintenance costs of building your own. Not everyone agrees with me of course and that’s the beauty of our free market, but i still don’t understand why someone would go this route for core maps/routes/geocoding. I’m biased as i want to see everyone building with VE of course, but if you have some insight into the deCarta model clue me in with a comment.

I came across this first app from the earthware blog this week - London Executive Property Bird

at first glance is just another Virtual Earth Real Estate app (JaveRea) but it is very well designed and contains some great UX touches like pin clustering. You can read the story of the company behind it in SQM Magazine this month on page 56. yes, its that kind of magazine with pages and all.

With Birds Eye Tourist in hibernation for nearly a year Virtual Globetrotting

has been the place to go for online sky spotting. And the gang at VG do an amazing job running that site; its very well organized and has easy to consume feeds for just about everything. and now there's a new kid in town picking up where BET left off with the longer format posts - Meet Virtual Birds Eye. VBE is a little more of a traditional blog featuring tutorials and detailed posts like this one on how to use Mapcruncher and Virtual Earth to view seating a the Indianapolis motor speedway. I hope they continue to focus on this type of content.

Next up is this flash based map for travel planning at Planet Eye. Its not just Flash for the sake of flash, but they use the tools at hand for some very useful effects.

And finally, I've been really enjoying this Silverlight based KML editor from IDV Solutions. read some background on the

app on their blog here.

On Tuesday August 19, 2008, we met at NovaCopy in downtown nashville.  Our speaker was John Rives of Amniox with a topic of "Clustered Virtualization of SQL Server".

John did a great job keeping the topics agnostic to the technology, and gave a solid rundown on many of the issues and concerns with running SQL Server (and any database system in a virtualized environment. He covered everything from current technology and some foresight into the future.

We had a good crowd again, with over 45 people in attendance:

Outside of the building, many folks took advantage of the Microsoft Across America Truck:

Next month, Louis Davidson (who is also writing this post) will be speaking on September 26, 2008 at 11:30 at the Microsoft office in Franklin, TN.  This will be an interactive session Database Design (and giving away swag for his new book release.) Come prepared to speak up as the session will be very interactive.

Additional pictures: