Chandu Thota is leaving the Virtual Earth/MapPoint group to join another group within Microsoft. He’s been there four years, during which time we heard about a good deal of his work. For example, some previous entries: Thota on Virtual Earth APIs; Programming MapPoint in .NET; New BlogMap API, Features.

The international bug in Virtual Earth 3D has been fixed by version 1.1, which was released over the weekend (James Fee, WLL/Virtual Earth).

Version 3.0 of MapCruncher was released Friday; changes include support for transparency and the new 3D Virtual Earth engine (James Fee, WLL/Virtual Earth). Previously: MapCruncher Update; MapCruncher.