You may have noticed we’ve added a couple new bloggers to the Bing Maps Blog. Well, I say that loosely because Johannes Kebeck has been a blogger extraordinaire on his Windows Live Spaces blog which has done quite well, but has decided to start posting his blog material here instead of on Live Spaces. Brian Hendricks is relatively new to the Bing Maps and Microsoft world, but has a lot of promise and insight into the direction of the product group. Here’s a little something about each of them:
Johannes Kebeck is a Bing Maps Technology Specialist, supporting customers and partners in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is currently based in Reading, UK. In October 2004 Johannes joined Microsoft in Germany working within the Enterprise & Partner Group and in 2005 he joined the Bing Maps team. Some of you may know Johannes from various postings on his private blog.
Brian Hendricks is a product manager for Bing Maps team and is responsible for launching new Bing Maps features and growing the map app platform. He recently joined Microsoft after graduating from the University of Michigan. While in school, he spent two and a half years as Microsoft’s on-campus Student Partner. In this role, he generated awareness for Windows 7, Office Live, and Zune and planned events for students to experience and enjoy Microsoft products. Besides being a newly passionate bungee-jumper, he is an avid historical fiction reader and an unrepentant classic board game lover. Brian will be writing about new consumer maps features, map apps, and how end-users can make decisions, gain new information, and have fun through Bing Maps.
Ideally, we’ll have many people coming out of the woodworks to post interesting posts with varying voices and points of view, so expect some dynamic arrangements coming over the Bing Maps Blog. Super excited about what this brings to you Bing Maps bloggers out there. You should be excited too! Johannes is an absolutely stud and goes deep on everything he does and finds ways to tie location into other Microsoft products. He has many posts on SQL Azure Spatial, Pivot, SQL Spatial, SharePoint, etc. The list goes on and on. Brian is just AMPED to have the opportunity to tell you everything we’re doing especially around Bing Map Apps, so expect some passionate posts from him.
Which leads you to the obvious question…yes, this is the end of an era. In two weeks, I’ll be stepping down as the Bing Maps Technical Evangelist. For over 3 years of my life I poured my heart and soul into this position to ensure Bing Maps was your mapping platform of choice (not to mention my 8 years at Microsoft in maps and over 10 years helping build some of the coolest enterprise mapping applications!). I traveled around the world and made friends everywhere. I can’t express how much gratitude I have for each of you whether we’ve met in person, communicated on the blog, chatted over email, be-friended on Facebook, stalk each other on foursquare or tweeted at each other on Twitter, all I can say is thank you. Effective September 13, 2010 I’m moving to a Sr. Program Manager position on the Bing Mobile team where I will oversee the development of some as-of-yet unannounced features (that will blow your mind!). I have a few more posts to get out; however, after that I won’t be blogging for a while, so you’ll have to follow my stream of tweets @ChrisPendleton if you miss me.
It’s been real people.
CP