Bing Maps: “The Hurricane Season”

 

The term ‘hurricane season’ recently brought new meaning to many communities across the U.S. East Coast in the wake of Hurricane Irene.  Being able to see the latest developments and impacted locations online through Bing Maps makes it possible to better anticipate, respond and recover from the destruction of hurricanes.

Around the world, people use Microsoft technology every day to stay in touch during difficult times. Today, we’re calling out a Bing Maps app launched by the Wall Street Journal that tracks hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Tech geek or not, you have to admit this is a useful app, especially now during hurricane season. Let’s take a closer look.

 

The app is an interactive graphic that charts both current hurricanes as they are happening, and chronicles previous hurricanes dating back to 2005. So if you’ve always wanted to be a weatherman, you can bookmark the link and visit it often to see the latest weather patterns – hurricane season or not. The app is easy to use, so no meteorology degree is required.

To watch a current storm’s path, you can follow it from the moment your browser opens to the app. The storms strength is categorized on the right hand side of the screen so you can see the severity of the storm and the route it is predicted to take.  Here, we see an example of a storm pattern that started near the Bahamas as a tropical storm and as it grew stronger it became a Category 5 making its way up through the Gulf of Mexico. As it got closer to the Gulf Coast it became less intense, still remaining a Category 3 and then tapering off back to a tropical storm status.

 

To see a past hurricane, just click on one of the blue lines and it will take you to the storm’s history and the calendar at the top will move to the month it happened.

 

 

 

With Bing Maps, it’s easy to zoom in and out by scrolling your mouse so you can zoom in to see high-levels of detail or zoom out to see the past patterns of multiple hurricanes in the Atlantic.

 

 

For you self-proclaimed geeks, here’s more on how the app was built and all the things it can do:

Bing Maps’ partner, OnTerra built the hurricane tracker working closely with the Wall Street Journal team. It was created using the Bing Maps AJAX7 API, JQuery and JavaScript. It gets data from NOAA which is processed into JSON data files and refreshed every few hours, which includes the hurricane path, predicted path and the cone of uncertainty polygons. The application works great on modern web browsers including iPhone, iPAD, Android and Blackberry devices, unlike Flash and Silverlight applications. The HTML5 support in the AJAX7 API provides solid mobile device integration for interactive mapping apps like the Wall Street Journal Hurricane Tracker.

The HealthGrades website and Bing Maps

 

Named one of the Top 50 Websites of 2011 by TIME, HealthGrades was already the leading online tool to help people rate and find doctors. But HealthGrades was determined to give customers an even better experience. Once users found “Dr. Right,” HealthGrades wanted to give folks an easy way to locate offices and quickly get directions. With Bing Maps, HealthGrades found they could seamlessly integrate maps into their physician search tool. Using the handy Bing Maps developer tools, HealthGrades built the maps integration themselves, with some architecture and design support from development partner, OnTerra. Way to go, HealthGrades!

HealthGrades

Whatever business you’re in, chances are there’s a Bing Maps solution waiting just for you. Build it yourself with our free web or phone SDKs. Or get a little help from one of our Bing Maps partners.

The Exceptional iPhone SIRI

 

Siri, or something similar, would become the norm for interfacing with smart phones and in doing so it would define the future of local search (and everything else). Well it seems to have succeeded on the everything front but just not on the local search front. The Siri natural language interface is a metaphor for interaction that will supplant the need for typing and can provide a hands free way to interact with smaller devices when typing is dangerous (ie driving) or awkward (ie all the time).

It works incredibly well and as John Gruber noted: “I wouldn’t say I can’t live without Siri. But I can say that I don’t want to.” It is that good.

It is hands down the best way to speedily create and send text messages regardless of whether you are driving or sitting. It is the best way to get driving directions detailed on the iPhone Google Map app. It is the best way to search the web whether you want to use Google, Yahoo or Bing. In fact it even fixes what was so miserably wrong with voice search in the Google app.

Its ability to understand what you want and what you are saying is uncanny. Even with background noise. I am a convert and while I will most definitely use it while driving, it may very well become my preferred interface for many other things as well.

It truly is a harbinger of a new level of functionality for interacting with your phone (and any small device for that matter). I won’t leave home without it.

EXCEPT FOR LOCAL SEARCH.

Siri can either interact with other apps or it can answer some things directly. For example you can say “Text Aaron I will be late picking you up” at which points it interprets your instructions, performs a voice to text translation, double checks its accuracy with you, understands that you want to text and then sends the note via the iMessage app. With some data types it will just answer you inside of the Siri environment. That is the design for interaction with both Wolfram Alpha and Yelp.

Danny Sullivan noted yesterday that when searching for local businesses, Siri accurately provides a list from Yelp but then doesn’t allow you to call the location, look at reviews or even get more details. For whatever reason, Apple and Yelp have decided to limit the functionality of the local search in such a way so that it is essentially useless, forcing a user to a different data source for the information.

Having marvelled at Siri’s capability, it is easy to imagine saying to Siri – “make a reservation at the Ho-Ste-Geh restaurant for 2″, “read me the reviews for the Rennas” or even “Add the Robins Nest’s contact details to my address book”. But the local search capability, doesn’t do any of that.

There are alternatives for a user of Siri to get local information. You just need to use the web search functionality of Google, Bing or Yahoo (use one or all three) by saying “Look on the web for a nearby restaurant” or “Google breakfast restaurants”. On the plus side, it no longer takes that 6 touches that Google voice search required to make a hands free call. Now when doing a local recovery search on Google it takes just one touch after the voice interaction to complete the call. And Siri does such a significantly better job of getting the search right the first time than Google voice search ever did. You wonder where Siri has been hiding.

But in limiting the functionality of the built in local search functionality, Apple and Yelp are missing a chance to change user behaviors. In not changing user behaviors from the gitgo they may miss the opportunity to break the habit later on. Natural language voice search on the smartphone is a long game, and the 1 million iPhones so far sold are just a drop in the bucket of the market. The real game is yet to come.

There is every reason to believe, seeing what else Siri can do, that increased local search functionality will arrive. But regardless of whether this was Yelp’s choice or Apple’s, from where I sit, this is an opportunity lost to win a battle in a long war.