Last week, Steven, The World By Road expedition leader, stopped by our office to talk about his amazing journey. Here is a brief description of the expedition:

The World by Road is an expedition that has successfully circumnavigated the globe through 68 different countries, over 6 continents, covering 70,000 miles. Two years from the start of the expedition, the crew has returned from this epic journey to Denver, CO. However, one last frontier waits to be tackled- a journey to the far north of Alaska, making their expedition the first expedition ever to drive to the most distant reaches north and south of all the continents. This last segment will set their journey apart, giving them the uniqueness they need to achieve their ultimate goal, to change people’s minds about the realities happening in the world today.

Take a look at The World By Road website to learn more about the expedition and to check out great photos and videos.

While on the road, Steven used UMapper extensively and told us number of ways in which we can improve our mapping tools to make them more usable by crazy adventures. Thanks!

Finally, here is how The World By Road looks on a map.

Are you doing cool things with UMapper? Let us know.

Following up on the release of Bing Maps we are excited to announce that UMap is officially integrated with Bing mapping services. The integration includes Routing, Geocoding, POI Search Token Authentication and Bing-styled map controls. The UMap 1.6 makes it extremely easy to bring the richness of Bing Maps into your Flash and Flex applications. Try it out!

Download UMap API v.1.6.5
View Documentation

In addition to Bing Maps integration this release includes the following bug fixes

• MarkerManager bugs with adding/removing markers at runtime
• ZoomControl big fixes:
• shows only available zoom levels
• getBounds() returns true component bounds for compact/expand views
• 1 px invisible border around UMap removed
• Various minor bug fixes

As always, we are looking forward to your feedback.

This week’s feature is the 100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer map based on the article with the same title in WIRED magazine. The map lists the most fun and geeky places around the world.

National Geographic Music has published a very cool music trivia game powered by UMapper:

Think you know a thing or two about music from the rest of the world? Well here’s your chance to match wits against the music geeks here at Nat Geo Music. In this beta version of our new game, we’ve put together this short quiz to test your knowledge of music from all over the world-and your geography skills. The questions vary in difficulty. Can you get 10 out of 10?

Play the game and see if you can score 10 out of 10!

The easiest way to spice up your map is to sprinkle some custom icons over it. In order to make this process easier we’ve decided to include a set of custom map icons in the next release of UMapper. Before we do that, though, we want to get your feedback on the icon set below:

Emergencies
Points of Interest
Transportation
Outdoor
Weather
Media
Misc

What do you think? Which icons (and colors) would you like to see?

These icons are a part of the open source Map Icons project and are available for download under the GNU General Public License v3. We strongly encourage you to download the source, contribute to the project and design some icons for UMapper!

Special thanks to Nico Mollet for starting the project!