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Microsoft Research is pretty impressive. From the site:

"Over the last 14 years, Microsoft Research has evolved into an organization with more than 700 researchers studying more than 55 research areas. These include speech recognition, information retrieval, user-interface research, programming tools and methodologies, operating systems and networking, graphics, natural language processing, machine learning, and mathematical sciences."
About MapCruncher and Virtual Earth

MapCruncher is a free tool developed by Microsoft Research. It will take an image in various formats, warps it to match the Virtual Earth map, and chop it up into tiles at various resolutions. Then it generates a sample web page that overlays the tiles onto a Virtual Earth (officially called Local.Live) page.

Here's their interactive Software Developers Kit (SDK) that shows you how to modify the default behavior of Virtual Earth. The best place to learn how to work with Virtual Earth is at the Via Virtual Earth site.

I've been using the tool in ways it wasn't intended, by entering non-map images and using the Virtual Earth framework to display the images, complete with zoom and pan capabilities.