I’m losing sight of the purpose of this blog, I’m not sure if it is a public voice or just somewhere I can keep tabs on activities and stories that interest me. Here is a story that appeared in New Zealand’s ComputerWorld that talks about SIMPL, or as we know it inside Microsoft the “Health Connection [...]

I am surprised that the Microsoft Environmental team still talks to me. They launched a really cool Microsoft Environment site back in May and I have been remiss in sharing that with my Virtual Earth for Public Sector readers. The site shares how Microsoft and its partners use innovative technologies and responsible business practices to address environmental challenges worldwide. And if I am writing about it, you know that Virtual Earth is well-represented.

The site can be found here. Look for the following Virtual Earth related information:

• Sungevity Uses Virtual Earth to Quickly, Remotely Assess Customer Sites. Solar power has enormous potential. But so far it’s not living up to that potential. In the U.S., for instance, solar provides less than 1 percent of the nation’s energy needs. That’s in part because solar energy installations for homes are typically custom-made, expensive units. What’s needed is a new way to market and install solar energy. "Solar is going to be huge, but to get there it needs to smarten up its game," says Danny Kennedy, CEO of Sungevity, a solar-energy startup that is looking to take that step. Based in Berkeley, Calif., and founded in 2008, Sungevity is aiming to become, as Fortune magazine called it, "the Dell of solar energy," using technology to create new efficiencies and better service customers. A key part of that is the way Sungevity takes advantage of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth global mapping platform to lower the cost of solar energy installation, help homeowners easily see the value of solar energy, and make its usage more widespread. Read full article here.
• Virtual Earth Brings Limited Water Resource into Focus. In 2007, the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) in Victoria, Australia engaged Geomatic Technologies, a Microsoft partner and specialist in location-based business intelligence, to develop a Groundwater Management Unit Inventory. The new Microsoft Virtual Earth-based groundwater management tool is designed to overcome a simple but daunting problem: mapping out areas of intensive groundwater use, determining management actions for stressed aquifers, and making that information quickly and widely available. Read full article.

• Microsoft Technology Powers Environmental Crisis–Response Tool. When a crisis strikes, timing is an organization's greatest resource, and often means the difference between containment and escalation. Enter JEPRS, the Joint Emergency Planning & Response System.JEPRS is a crisis and incident management solution developed by Infusion Development, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. JEPRS connects all critical stakeholders, including Disaster Managers, Operations Managers, and Field First Responders with common operating information about a crisis that they can access anytime, anywhere. The 3-D mapping capabilities of Microsoft Virtual Earth combined with the data power of Microsoft SharePoint make JEPRS an extremely effective tool for managing environmental events. Read full article here.

• Environmental Protection Agency Improves Data Visualization with Mapping Technology. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for ensuring public access to environmental information associated with facilities and sites across the country. For years, EPA provided a Web-based data-access tool that combined facility-level environmental information with online maps. However, the technology in use provided only static maps with limited interactive functionality. EPA recently replaced its outdated technology with Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ technology, which offers high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery, dramatically faster response times, and easy integration with environmental data sets. As a result, EPA expects a more consumer-friendly data resource, an innovative foundation for future growth, and a more efficient IT platform. Full case study here.
• European Environment Agency and Microsoft Eye on Earth Observatory Bring European Beach Quality Into Sharp Focus. Microsoft Corp and the European Environment Agency (EEA) today announced the launch of the pioneering Eye on Earth online environmental observatory with the first of its resources, Water Watch. Eye on Earth is part of a five-year collaboration between the EEA and Microsoft that will ultimately gather together critical information, including European water soil, air and ozone indicators, into one place. From today, Eye on Earth allows governments, policymakers and individuals to compare the cleanliness of bathing water from sites across 27 European countries, giving people the power to choose where they swim and to influence their environment. Read full story.

While you're out on the site, be sure to check out the other articles, case studies and information on how Microsoft is actively striving to be a good steward for the environment by adhering to sound environmental principles and business practices.

My colleague Bill Crounse has posted a video up on the MSR site that looks at some of the ideas that our Health Solutions Group are thinking about as future challenges and opportunities for IT in healthcare. You’ll find it posted here; In this special two-part video edition of House Calls for Healthcare Professionals, Bill Crounse, MD, [...]

Here's a technology I really haven't discussed much on the Virtual Earth for Public Sector blog (shame on me).

Until now, Photosynth was a  Live Labs research project that you could just get a glimpse of through a technology preview web site. But the Photosynth team was recently moved into the Virtual Earth team and has released an official Photosynth site that allows you to not only view Photosynth collections hosted there, but to add your own. Time to bring it to the attention of Public Sector customers, given its ability to allow for images collected in the field to be assembled in a manner to then allow the scene to be explored and navigated in a 3D like manner.

So what is Photosynth? Borrowing from the About Photosynth discussion on the site: It is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs--the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.  Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

The new Photosynth site hosts some great collections. You can check out some photos of Constitution Hall on the site here. Press the down arrow a few times to see the document in the context of the whole hall.  This  one of a Boulder tea house illustrates how a complex room can be quickly recorded and easily reviewed and shared, zoom back with the scroll wheel to see the whole room.  This Boulder aerial synth is wild ... it shows a great view of Boulder, about 400 of them actually, all automagically assembled into a 3D web accessible collection in a matter of a few hours.  Next best thing to buying an UltraCam, Microsoft's large format digital aerial camera, holding it out the window of your plane, and building your own Virtual Town!

[NOTE: Viewing the Photosynth site requires installation of the

The best part: Photosynth will be linking up more with Virtual Earth. For now Photosynth lets you geotag your Synth collections with Virtual Earth, just look for the little button next to the Synth’s viewer window.

Chris Pendleton provides an example of this, code and all, in his Virtual Earth Developer's blog. Meanwhile, you can see an instructional video on collecting imagery and creating the Synth collection.

I mentioned PhotoSynth last October when we released a Synth of the space shuttle that has been put together in collaboration with NASA. It seems that one Wednesday of last week Photosynth 1.0 was released, so now you can make Synths from your own photos. Check out the release note on the team blog here; We’re pleased [...]

It's good to see that Photosynth is finally bolting out of the stable door. I've been playing around with this for some time internally at Microsoft and I know there are a lot of folks around looking forward to playing with it. I'm also aiming to wrap it into my own research work into how new creative technology tools like this and Silverlight can let us explore and communicate a sense of time and place in new, much more immersive ways.

There's a nice British flavour to the launch too, with the London Eye, Eton College, Stonehenge and a few other places included. Photosynth is a nice example of innovation in research moving through into a live online service.

Technorati tags: innovation creativity Web 2.0 technology photosynth UK Microsoft

The text below was posted today on ISO’s site; 2008-08-15 The two ISO and IEC technical boards have given the go-ahead to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard after appeals by four national standards bodies against the approval of the document failed to garner sufficient support. None of the [...]

The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.  - Ronald Reagan President Reagan had many talents, one of which was the innate ability to take very complex issues and sum them [...]