MetaCarta is providing local news to the recently announced Microsoft Vine:
MetaCarta, Inc., the leading provider of geographic search solutions, today announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to provide the MetaCarta Geographic Search and Referencing Platform to deliver map-based local news within the Microsoft Vine service. Microsoft Vine connects individuals to the people and places they care about most, when it matters. It helps people stay in touch with family and friends and enables them to send alerts when someone needs help. With the Microsoft Vine personal dashboard, people can get involved by creating groups, then sending them alerts and reports to stay in touch, informed and involved.
Among other things, MetaCarta takes unstructured data and associates it with a location. The technology behind its GeoSearch News site is what’s being used by Microsoft.
I’m still waiting to get access so I haven’t been able to use Vine. But there’s something very interesting here. Note the language used in the text of the release quoted above: “Microsoft Vine connects individuals to the people and places they care about most, when it matters.”
To me this implies broader long-term ambitions for Vine than just emergency communications.
