Steve Strong discusses the application that he used during his travel around the country and how he profits by Silverlight and the Virtual Earth module.
One of the goals of the trip was to fieldtest technology, including the Virtual Earth Silverlight control. You can see the MIX09 presentation here at http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T34F
So you might be thinking, why not just do this from home? I believe that you can see the issues more clearly if you put yourself into the situations in which you expect the software to be used. After all, Pixar animators traveled to South America as inspiration for the movie "UP", and traveled along Route 66 in preparation for the movie "Cars".