Redmond, Washington— As always its mapping, search, and location Cloud applications are concerned, Microsoft is winding up 2008 with nothing short of a bang. The Virtual Earth Blog announced that not only did the Redmond company have taken the Holiday celebration to a whole new memorable level by putting up Santa Claus’ North Pole village in Virtual Earth and letting users to track his journey around the world in 3D, but is also delivering a massive 48 terabytes (TB) data and images update for some locations on Virtual Earth.
Microsoft usually seems loyal to multi-TB updates for Virtual Earth, and the latest refresh makes no exception to this rule, with approximately 50 terabytes of new content.
“We have been conducting some housecleaning since the past 2 months with some of our road network data. As a result, [an update] to let you know of a HUGE refresh / release (48TB worth) of all tile sets where vector information is included — Road, Hybrid Aerial, and Hybrid Bird’s Eye,” Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth tech evangelist, Microsoft Live Search, revealed.
According to Pendleton, the December 2008 update to Virtual Earth includes:
• Global vector data updates
• Multilingual tile sets for all zoom levels (French, Italian, German, Spanish)
• Japan localized tile sets
• All oblique (Bird’s Eye) photography reprocessed with new road labels (minus Japan)
The December 2008 Virtual Earth data update comes just after two months since Microsoft introduced the last update to Virtual Earth. At the beginning of November, the Redmond Company provided no less than 41.07 TB worth of new aerial photography to Virtual Earth. Even so, despite the Virtual Earth 3D Santa tracker experiment, the software giant has found the time to top the October 2008 update with the latest refresh of 48TB.
The new data update includes the following countries: Greece, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Mexico.