The Members Forum

Sometimes, strange stories catch my privacy watchdog eye like when consumer products can stalk their buyer. Today we have a story of two different marketing promotions, one seems cool and one seems creepy, but both are high tech and include GPS. One sets off a privacy red alert by taking marketing promotions to a whole new disturbing yet innovative level.

Microsoft did a great job engaging the public to have fun with its King of Bing Maps competition. On August 20th, Microsoft will announce which Map App takes the throne. One interesting Bing app can calculate taxi fares. Microsoft continues to improve the capabilities of Bing Maps, claiming that Mapping Service Increases Performance by 80% with Global Data Center Network. Bing Maps is also now tied into the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. The open source mapping project nicknamed the "Wikipedia of maps" can be edited by anyone to include everything from street names to GPS readings.

Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation, blogged, "OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the newest layer for Bing Maps and the newest Bing Map App in the gallery. The map app, dubbed simply, 'OpenStreetMap' loads OSM maps as a new map style option. OpenStreetMap follows a similar concept as Wikipedia, but for maps and other geographic facts (despite its name, it's by no means only limited to streets and roads). A community of map lovers and developers gather location data across the globe from a variety of sources such as recordings from GPS devices, from free satellite imagery or simply from knowing an area very well, for example because they live there. This information then gets uploaded to OpenStreetMap's central database from where it can be further modified, corrected and enriched by anyone who notices missing facts or errors about the area."

Networkworld has the details HERE!