OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast joins Bing

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When Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap and co-founder of CloudMade
announced in October that he was leaving CloudMade there was no
expectation that he would be idle for long. In the interim he decided
to revolutionize transit data by founding http://transiki.org/ took
some hang gliding lessons and by the way co-organized a great
geo-unconference in Denver last weekend.

But what else has Steve done lately?

He’s decided to revolutionize Bing Maps.

As announced today on his blog Steve Coast will be joining Microsoft
property, Bing Maps as Principal Architect on Bing Mobile.

And Microsoft is donating their global aerial imagery to OpenStreetMap
contributors for use in improving OpenStreetMap.

You will certainly want to read the complete announcement at the following link.

http://blog.stevecoast.com/im-working-at-microsoft-and-were-donating-ima

Update, further information on the Bing blog, here,

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/11/23/bing-engag…

Congratulations, Steve!

4 thoughts on “OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast joins Bing”

  1. Nate Lawrence

    Fantastic news!I remember hearing Blaise Agüera y Arcas say back in May of 2009, "One of the big thrusts that I’ve really been pushing in the past six months is to take the kind of openness that we started with in Photosynth and extend the openness a great deal so that we make much richer use of and give much more contribution to open sources like OpenStreetMap and really let many more players in and out of that ecosystem – turn it into much more of an ecosystem and less of a closed product.", so it’s great to see Bing Maps begin to give back to OSM.I do hope that they make the OSM layer slightly more easily accessible than it has been (in other words make it available in both Silverlight and AJAX), and I’m eager to see them begin to use points of interest from OSM to query against, but I’m sure we’ll see that soon enough with Steve there.I’m a huge proponent of Photosynth and PhotoCity’s power and getting interaction between OpenStreetMap and Bing Maps should make things very interesting. The amount of Creative Commons licensed photos on Photosynth is really amazing.

  2. Nate Lawrence

    Fantastic news!I remember hearing Blaise Agüera y Arcas say back in May of 2009, "One of the big thrusts that I’ve really been pushing in the past six months is to take the kind of openness that we started with in Photosynth and extend the openness a great deal so that we make much richer use of and give much more contribution to open sources like OpenStreetMap and really let many more players in and out of that ecosystem – turn it into much more of an ecosystem and less of a closed product.", so it’s great to see Bing Maps begin to give back to OSM.I do hope that they make the OSM layer slightly more easily accessible than it has been (in other words make it available in both Silverlight and AJAX), and I’m eager to see them begin to use points of interest from OSM to query against, but I’m sure we’ll see that soon enough with Steve there.I’m a huge proponent of Photosynth and PhotoCity’s power and getting interaction between OpenStreetMap and Bing Maps should make things very interesting. The amount of Creative Commons licensed photos on Photosynth is really amazing.

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