National Geographic and Weather.com are not, if we’re to be honest, nearly as trendy as something like Twitter or Facebook. Still, both entities garner a significant amount of respect (and a significant number of page views), and Bing recently received a sort of nod from each of them.
Let’s start with the organization best known for its yellow magazines. On the Bing Maps Blog, Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps Technical Evangelist, wrote, “National Geographic is publishing 120 years worth of their magazines onto a 6 DVD set (or external hard drive) . . .” Then here’s the key point: “NatGeo uses Bing Maps in their Geobrowse functionality which allows you to browse a map anywhere in the world to find locations where relevant articles are referenced using geographic metadata.”
It says a lot that a 120-year-old, non-profit, scientific and educational institute trusts Bing to get things right, eh?
As for the Weather.com development, Pendleton stated that it “just recently added the ability to view ‘Futures’ on the map. Futures are essentially a predictive model overlain and animated over the top of the Bing Map embedded into the web site.”
And again, since The Weather Channel (which owns Weather.com) has a good reputation, this counts as an important endorsement for Bing.
UPDATE: A Weather.com representative politely wrote in “to clarify that the name of the product . . . is actually TruPoint, not Futures . . .”
She then continued, “To give some brief background information on the technology, the patented TruPoint technology allows The Weather Channel to pinpoint exactly where weather systems are heading which helps users plan ahead. By breaking the forecast down into 15-minute increments, TruPoint local forecasts and radar imagery make it possible to know almost to the minute when a storm may pass through. TruPoint technology from The Weather Channel delivers the most accurate weather reports and forecasts than any other weather provider. . . . For more information, please visit http://www.weather.com/encyclopedia/trupoint.html“
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