Vincent Tao, Director of Microsoft's Live and Local Search and Virtual Earth gave an absolutely awesome presentation this afternoon.  First he spoke about Where is the "where?".  Essentially, he see's location as nothing but an index to information.  As such, he said that we need to move from organizing spatial information to organizing information spatially.  Next, he discussed how people look for information indexed by location?  Here's his lowdown:

First look: Entry points to location data?  (Or where is the "where?")  Specifically, he was talking about location based services vs. location powered services.  So, what does that mean and what's the difference: People come to social network sites for socializing, not for location information.  The location component is value-added.  In general, most location services are powering today's hot social sites.  This is not location based services...this is powered by location services.  Big differences...and most people are using location powered services, not location based services.  So, the where is not so much at "mapping" sites as it is at sites we use every day.

Devices (what do people use to get their location data): PC queries at 71% represent the largest slice of pie.  Cell phones are 5% of the pie, phone data (i.e. mobile browsers) is at 2% but with a growth rate of a projected 71% in the next year, in vehicle navigation is at 1% with a 20% projected growth rate next year, and the remainder is still from print (you remember...those paper map thingies?).

Next, Vincent moved to show all of the way cool stuff coming (or just released) in Virtual Earth.  Microsoft views VE as an enabling platform.  As Vincent said, "We don't want one earth...we want you to create an ecosystem of millions of earths."  So here's the coolness of VE on it's way or here already: 

• VE for Mobile Search: Image mapping + real-time traffic + new voice search (recently released and very cool...I've been using it and it works great).
• VE for Messenger: Not enabled in U.S. yet, but coming
• VE add-in for Outlook: Can tie in to appointments...provide auto-reminders for meetings based on distance from meeting location and real-time traffic updates.  "Better leave for your meeting now...major traffic on I-5!"
• VE and SQL Spatial coming in June.  We're all anxiously awaiting this one!
• 500 world wide 3D cities...adding 200 more in the next year!
• Automated image processing to remove moving objects from VE tiles.
• Automated 3D city model generation: Major Secret Sauce here, but they're cranking out cities very quickly.
• V2 Cities: Upgraded textures and quality.  Much closer to reality with trees and everything...automatically!  Some of the demos he showed were almost indistinguishable from real photos.
• And, the coolest of the cool...VE and crowd sourcing: Your own photo experiences....we're talking 3D vertical photo rectification here folks!!!  Yeah...slightly impressive.  Can't wait for this to come out.
• Beyond your photos:  Dynamic real-time shadows in 3D cities.  It's done and it's coming.