Commercial Control - can we use v3 with what/where turned on?

Commercial Control - can we use v3 with what/where turned on?

• Joseph Fluckiger

  Totally agree. I hope MS can work out an ad-driven model instead of transaction based.

  Neilgd wrote:

  5,000 transactions isn't very many. Especially if 1 transaction is 8 tiles - a couple of hundred page views a day with a bit of scrolling around would soon use all that up. No such limitation on Google maps (only that it must be available for free to consumers). Does anybody from Microsoft think that this limitation will be removed It'll be hard to do anything serious with the licence agreement as it stands.

  
  

• smitaB

  Microsoft really need to have a good think about this as the wrong decision will see us all move to different technology. I really like VE and want to use it in various commerical projects.
  Now on one side MS is telling us to build really good looking software with rich interfaces for the next generation of HD displays and the like. This is what will seperate us from others they say. Yes Vista looks really cool.
  Then we hear they will charge us per 8 tiles - so we if we go and display this on a HD (1920x1200 or more) monitor it will cost even more then with map point. And we better not let our users zoom, pan or refresh.
  The biggest problem is we can't on-bill our clients for this. No body in the real world understands they will have to pay per 8 tiles! I need to say it will cost $x per month. Now under a per 8 tile model with the rich functionlaity I am unable to calulate a per monthly price for a client.
  Give me a per user per month fee or a server fee and I'll give you thousands of clients.
  For example if I have 10,000 users paying $0.50 a month out of their service fee to use VE then MS makes $5000 a month from me and their is no risk on my part. Now lets say an average user uses 1000 sets of 8 tiles a month then under a 1c per click model this is $100,000 in fees. When it scales to 1 million users we are talking $500,000 a month in revenue for MS under the per user model or $10,000,000 per month on the click model. Now with that budget we would build our own VE clone on a cluster of servers.
  Come on MS give as a low cost per user or free advertising model so we can make the most of this technology.
  John.
  
  
  

• Paula D

  Can you quantify what's meant by "a lot of traffic" (i.e. daily use of address resolution, maps, routes, etc.) Is this still evolving

  Thanks,
  Jeff

  
  
  

• kmccaa

  adaley wrote:

  Yes, the v1 commercial control is no longer supported and the v3 control is meant to replace it.

  Ok, with this being the case, how do I configure my VE v3 javascript to tell microsoft that this is my application calling it. I'd like to see a code sample of how I pass user information to microsoft telling them who is using it, with something other than IP. I would love to assume that some of that information will be provided when a contract is completed between my company and MS, but I know my customers will want the application avaiable immediately after the contract is signed, so if I can have my code ready when the time comes, it would be useful.

  
  

• ABJcarlos

  Yes, the v1 commercial control is no longer supported and the v3 control is meant to replace it.  It is governed by a slightly different terms of use model, so be sure to check those out for full details.

  As far as pricing is concerned, you should discuss with your Virtual Earth sales representative.  Because pricing is provided on a per-use basis, it scales very well from a small company to the largest enterprises. Businesses of all sizes benefit fromt he service model as they do not need to make an investment in the infrastructure, licensing fees, or maintenance costs, let alone the domain specific knowledge, required when using traditional GIS systems.

  Alex

  
  
  

• daniel 01

  Ok, I have a followup question. Knowing there is a possibility the company I work for could generate more than 5000 transaction in a 24 hour period, we have been working with folks from Microsoft to set up a contract based on Mappoint "per transaction" model. I haven't seen how to do this yet, but I was told that this is going to be handled by use of a key or some information I would pass to VE letting Microsoft know what company is calling it. Is this feature somewhere in v3 or if we go with a liscence agreement, are we thereby stuck using the commercial control which my understanding is at v1 still
  

• MichMash

  I wouldn't necessarily mind paying for transactions. It would depend on the transaction cost. Anybody know what that might be
  

• Balascandent

  There is a built in tile caching that occurs, or so I was told. My manager and I had a discussion about how quickly we would go through transactions, and through the chain of communication, he found out that the tiles do automatically cache locally. This means that return users when first loading your map, assuming you bring up some default view, will not incur more transactions. The pricing model I heard didn't sound too horrible from the perspective of a large company using it, something like 500,000 transactions for $8000, but DO NOT QUOTE ME ON THAT.

  No matter what, I'm still going to end up working on a VE map that is contracted with MS, so I would love to know how they are going to track usage and if its the same in the Commercial Contraol and the V3 standard control.

  
  

• Willgart

  From section 8 of the agreement doc

  Without limiting the foregoing, You may not request more than Five Thousand (5,000) Transactions from the API in a twenty four hour period.

  
  
  

• J Mac M

  Microsoft has done a fantastic job of making this hard to understand :)

  http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/control/terms.mspx

  You can use V3 without the what & where search now

  If you are generating a lot of traffic Microsoft expects you to pay as per the MapPoint Webservice.

  
  
  

• Chibuzo

  5,000 transactions isn't very many. Especially if 1 transaction is 8 tiles - a couple of hundred page views a day with a bit of scrolling around would soon use all that up. No such limitation on Google maps (only that it must be available for free to consumers).

  Does anybody from Microsoft think that this limitation will be removed It'll be hard to do anything serious with the licence agreement as it stands.

  
  

• Samuel_zhang

  An arm and a leg they told me. ;) just kidding. But if you look at Yahoo Maps API limit, which is 50,000 queries/day, and 1 query is 1 API call, not 8 tiles or something, you know this VE 5000/8 limit is too low. We at least need a reasonable lift on the limit.
  
  

• thompson16

  Microsoft remove a limitation. HAHAHAHAHA.

  Not that I want to start a debate on this topic, but one big reason I can't use Google for my project is the requirement to NOT track resources live via GPS, which Microsoft will at least allow, for a fee of course.

  
  
• Commercial Control - can we use v3 with what/where turned on?