MapsPoint will ultimately be replaced by MSN Virtual Earth. Right now, MapsPoint covers over 30 countries, however, MSN Virtual Earth is just the US now. They are working fast to cover more countries. I think he said he is going live with this (out of beta) in February or January of next year (but listen to the video to validate this). There is no activex, it works pretty much in both Firefox and IE.
The video is available at virtual_earth_2005_channel9_video.wmv
I am still watching the video, I love hearing techs talk about cool stuff like this.
This comes by way of Michael Nguyen at Social Patterns, nice find!
