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The Battle of the 3D Maps between Google and Microsoft was joined today at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference where each of the contenders introduced new 3D imagery features for their online mapping services.
Microsoft spiffed up Live Search Maps with photo-realistic 3-D aerial imagery of New York City and several other cities. (Note that the approved brand name is apparently now Microsoft, not Windows, Live Search Maps.) Meanwhile, Google introduced Google Maps Street View for a number of major US cities which allows you to “virtually explore city neighborhoods by viewing and navigating within 360-degree scenes of street-level imagery.” See this video or experiment for yourself.
I found both of these 3D offerings a trifle quirky, but amusing to fool with. The real question though is how well 3D imagery helps attract advertising dollars and that remains to be seen.
Microsoft got its wish and there will be a second stage investigation by the Federal Trade Commission of the Google acquisition of Internet ad firm DoubleClick. The news was broken by Steve Lohr at the NY Times this morning and confirmed by Google later in the day:
Google is confident the FTC will conclude the acquisition “poses no risk to competition,” Google said in the statement.
Several independent analysts have determined that “the online advertising industry is a dynamic and evolving space … and that rich competition in this industry will bring more relevant ads to consumers and more choices for advertisers and Web site publishers,” the company said.
The company pointed to other companies’ recent acquisitions in the online advertising market as evidence of competition there.
Microsoft’s subsequent acquisition of aQuantive Inc figures prominently in the talking points.
Also, the investigation may open a real can of worms for all Internet advertising sellers, including Microsoft, since the FTC apparently plans to investigate the privacy aspects of the deal, not just its effects on competition. You may recall that Microsoft touts its adCenter advertising platform as offering better demographic targeting than competitors, which is the polite way of saying they think they know a lot about their search and MSN/Windows Live users.
Dan Fost and Ryan Kim at the SF Chronicle hooked up with Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division President for a serving of his trademark happy talk about the bright prospects for Microsoft’s sagging entertainment initiatives. Among the less than meaty tidbits was an update on the Zune which Bach reports will pass the million unit sales mark in June.
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Yesterday, the popular Facebook social networking Web site officially launched the Facebook Platform which allows 3rd parties to write applications which will be available to Facebook users. Among the 70 companies developing programs and/or tools for the platform is Microsoft as Joshua Allen explains:
People using Popfly can now drag-drop to create in-browser mashups that use Facebook friends, photos, and events. Since it’s using Popfly, the Facebook mashups can also include existing Popfly blocks, for example mashing up your Facebook friends list with XBox 360 gamer tags.
And for developers, we’ve created a Facebook developer’s toolkit to enable you to code against Facebook with any of our programming languages. The toolkit includes components, controls, and samples for both web development and client development. Especially check out the fully-functional sample using WPF and LINQ to make a 3D rolodex.
You can download the toolkit and Visual Studio Express both for free starting now.
Seems a reasonable way to bring in new prospects for Microsoft’s development tools.
