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Maybe if you call making an obvious incremental improvement of a competitor's existing product innovative.

It's not like there aren't other better implemented alternatives out there either. And those are real and working, not some recorded and edited demo with near infinite resources to make it look quick for the video...

This whole article is a Microsoft Marketing puff-piece. Even the (near identical) comments in most of the discussion forums have been orchestrated.

It's been a while since I last looked at this, but a company in Sweden came up with an, arguably, better method to both Google and Bing for 3d maps.

Swedish mapping website Hitta.se has a feature similar to Street View, but with higher resolution and they do not even blur faces.

i.e. link

When you look up an adress in the core of Stockholm, you get a picture of the house... Pretty nifty, although it hasn't spread to the suburbs yet... Linky: http://www.hitta.se/SearchCombi.aspx?__VIEWSTATE=% 2FwEPDwUKMTg4NDI3NTMzNWRk&UCSB%3AWflWhite=1a1b&UCS B%3AWflPink=4a&SearchType=4&UCSB%3ABBX1=&UCSB%3ABB Y1=&UCSB%3ABBX2=&UCSB%3ABBY2=&UCSB%3ATextBoxWho=&U CSB%3ATextBoxWhere=sveav%E4gen+50+stockholm&UCSB%3 AButtonSearch=%A0%A0hitta!%A0%A0&CombiResults%3AUs erControlMapControl%3Acx=1452661&CombiResults%3AUs erControlMapControl%3Acy=6704833&CombiResults%3AUs erControlMapControl%3ApointsHidden=&CombiResults%3 AUserControlMapControl%3Az=9

This is already quite common in Sweden. While they haven't gotten around to photographing very many buildings, at least most of the normal-sized cities are covered.

It is not used primarily for insurance reasons, but as a complement to online maps (i.e. google maps) where you can 'walk' a street by viewing a building, and how it looks looking left or right from that building. Then being able to change viewpoint from one building to another, following the street, can be very useful.

If I'm going somewhere new where I've not been before I normally check out what the building looks like, and how it looks around.

An example (of 'my' building): http://www.hitta.se/SearchCombi.aspx?SearchType=4& UCSB%3AWflWhite=1a1b&UCSB%3AWflPink=4a&UCSB%3AText BoxWho=&UCSB%3ATextBoxWhere=gibraltargatan+80%2C+g %25u00f6teborg#contactlinks (clicking 'fler bilder' close to the building picture will give you the view to the left and right, as well. Then click the little left and right arrows to navigate around the street.)

IKEA is short for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Aggunaryd and should be capitalized. BTW, this is Elmtaryd, now try to pronounce it ;)