A couple of days ago Robert Scoble posted on his visit to Vexcel, the wholly owned Microsoft facility that helps to produce Bing Maps imagery, where he toured the 5 petabyte data storage containers used by Bing Maps. He also had a chance to talk to Charlie Peterson (sp?), Director of Production at Bing Imagery Technology, and Wolfgang Walcher, about those containers, but also a bit about what’s coming up next for Bing Maps.
In the audio, at about 6:50, Scoble asks Wolfgang Walcher about what’s coming up next for Bing Maps in the next 3- 6 months. Walcher starts out by saying “more of the same”, meaning more new imagery with better resolution in more places, but then he goes on a bit further. He takes a bit of a shot at Microsoft Research, who just showed off StreetSlide:
"MSR has the habit of just going out and blurting out what they’re working on"
and then goes on to remind us of the work Bing Maps is doing with user contributed content (which Blaise Aguera y Arcas showed off at TED this spring):
"what’s going to be showing up is user contributed information of all sorts"
"there’s talks about indoors and stuff of that nature"
"clearly, what we do with our PhotoSynth, and those applications that harvest imagery say on Flickr, you can clearly see where it is going
Just a reminder that there’s lots more to come from Bing Maps than just the new lavender look (and a perfect backdrop for content to come?)