Imaging Know-How Could Boost Microsoft Applications

Microsoft's buy of Vexcel, a specialist in imagery, remote sensing and "photogrammetry," was overshadowed by the near-simultaneous acquisition of Massive, but it may be the more interesting of the two moves.

Photogrammetry is technology that gleans information about objects by recording, measuring and interpreting images of them and patterns of electromagnetic or radiant energy and other phenomena.

Microsoft's purchase of Vexcel, Boulder, Colo., and Massive, New York, was announced Thursday as part of Microsoft's MSN Summit. Massive specializes in placing ads in video games. No terms were disclosed.

Vexcel's 2-D and 3-D imagery should bolster Microsoft's "Virtual Earth" business. In a statement, Stephen Lawler, general manager of Virtual Earth said "delivering best-of-breed local search and mapping offerings to consumers, businesses and government customers will depend on providing a rich, immersive and dynamic experience that mirrors what can be experienced in the real world." Virtual Earth competes with Google Maps.

Microsoft partners say the company is doing a lot of interesting enablement in several areas around mapping, geographical information systems (GIS) and related areas.

They cite this nascent Windows Live application. Local Live gives surfers both aerial and driver- (or pedestrian-) eye views of their on-screen locale. Such technology paired with a rich database of local businesses can provide an array of location-based services, partners said.

This service currently covers just downtown San Francisco and Seattle, but in the words of one partner, "this is dramatic technology. Microsoft has taken Google Maps and Keyhole and trumped them," he noted.

Last month, Paul Flessner, Microsoft's senior vice president of data and storage platforms, said one priority is expanding the current data store and database functions to handle not just text and tables, but images and sounds.

One stumbling block thus far has been a weakness in pattern- and image- recognition algorithms. That is an area to be addressed by third parties, and/or by Microsoft itself, he noted.

Right now if a user does a Google Image search, for example, the search hits on tagged keywords, "Britney Spears." In the future sophisticated databases and algorithms would enable a match on Ms. Spears' face. (Or whatever).

Data stores and databases will have to be redesigned or retrofitted to handle these content-rich data types and make them searchable on more than text tags, observers said. In Microsoft's case, the ability to handle that data and search it will come in the "Katmai" timeframe. Katmai is the next-gen SQL Server, expected by sources to debut in 2008.

A confluence of trends could enable an explosion of image-laden applications. Real estate searches could be done based on images of building types and locations; online shoppers looking for a specific article of clothing by style, color etc., could find it by dragging and dropping an image -- say a digital snapshot taken by camera phone -- to locate similar articles.

And then there are serious security and defense applications.