Lansing, MI, May 17, 2010—As attacks on shipping generate worldwide headlines, Piracy Watch, a new Bing Maps App from IDV Solutions, lets people view the location and details of recent pirate attacks.

The new application, from the maker of Visual Fusion enterprise mashup and data visualization software, launched on May 15 and lets users view the details of each attack and sort attacks by date, aggressor, and type of victim (yacht or bulk carrier, for example).

Piracy Watch is IDV's first contribution to the Bing Maps App Gallery, which presents applications by Microsoft and third parties. The gallery is a Microsoft initiative to integrate Bing with Silverlight and other technologies. To display the gallery, users of Bing Maps classic version should switch to the Silverlight version (select the link under "Explore the new Bing Maps" in the left side panel); then click on the Map Apps button at lower left to access the gallery.

The Bing Maps application is an offshoot of the Piracy Watch application on IDV's website at http://vfdemo.idvsolutions.com/piracy/. The full version includes a full 30 years of piracy data, and uses IDV's Visual Fusion to provide unique map tools, a heat map, and an interactive timeline that lets users filter the data by date, and navigate through time to understand the changing impact of piracy on different parts of the world.

“We are very excited to make this information available to a wider audience through Bing Maps,” explained Scott Caulk, Director of Product Management at IDV Solutions. “This app demonstrates some of the power and usefulness of the visualizations you can create with Visual Fusion software. Users can see how presenting data in a geographic context promotes greater understanding and produces insights unavailable in other presentations."

Visual Fusion enables organizations to create geographic visualizations of their own data; it provides an intuitive user interface and tools for building business-focused mashups, executive dashboards, location intelligence applications, interactive maps, common operational pictures, and other business intelligence applications.

ut IDV Solutions
IDV Solutions is an enterprise software company committed to helping Global 2000 and government organizations make their information more accessible, understandable, and contextual. Their suite of products, Visual Fusion, forms an enterprise mashup platform for creating interactive, visual applications utilizing the power of SharePoint. This software empowers everyone in an organization to create interactive, geospatial mashups from unlimited sources of data. It provides a streamlined platform for building Enterprise 2.0 apps that drive agility, collaboration, and insight. Contact IDV Solutions at http://www.idvsolutions.com.