I’d like to send out a welcome to one of OGC’s newest members, Microsoft. The SQL Server team is readying spatial support in the database with SQL Server 2008, which will have lot’s of OGC goodness built-in, like Well-Known Text and GML data encodings, and Simple Features for SQL access.

The Virtual Earth team has long supported GeoRSS in their Collections, and KML import and export is the newest OGC-related feature in the Virtual Earth/Live Maps product. Check out Steve Lombardi’s excellent blog for more info. MapCruncher is another very cool offering in the online-geo space that allows “regular” folks to upload scanned maps and perform some basic image rectification so that they can be overlaid on orthophotos.

I can’t wait to see what people do with all these features, and hope to see some cool cross-product mashups with all the content in Google, Microsoft and Yahoo geo-services.