We’ve raised $12.3M in Series B funding!

We’re extremely pleased to announce that we have received $12.3M in a Series B round of funding led by Greylock Partners, which also includes our original investor Sunstone Capital.

This new investment will be used by CloudMade to do two primary things:

  • Expand our support to developers and businesses in building and monetizing apps, products and services that use maps and location – this will supplement our existing developer products which include:  Style Editor, Data Market Place and Navi Studio
  • Building out and adding to our popular suite of consumer mapping products, Mapzen which severely reduce the complexity of mapping for all

We welcome Arnon Dinur, Partner at Greylock to our Board of Directors and look forward to leveraging his expertise. Commenting on the funding Arnon said:

“CloudMade is leading a dramatic change in the way maps and location data are being created, distributed, used and monetized,” said Greylock Partner Arnon Dinur, who joined CloudMade’s Board of Directors as part of this investment. “We believe that consumers and developers’ needs for daily updated maps with greater detail and relevance, will explode in the coming years. Using CloudMade’s platform enables the best return on investment to meet this growth.”

We look forward to continuing supporting developers and the OpenStreetMap community with new innovative products.

July 27th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in cloudmade | | 0 Comments

Join us for a Hands-on Labs session at WWDC with our iPhone tech team – drop in or book an appointment

photo

We’re at the InterContinental, adjacent to the Moscone Center (where WWDC is being held) from 7-11am this week, Wednesday through Friday and would love to speak to you about your app development. Get a fantastic free breakfast and lets talk tech.

Come speak to our engineering team about CloudMade maps, our iPhone SDK, Style Editor product, location-based ads, how to get routing and use geocoding in your apps. Also find out about the free premium support we’re offering to WWDC attendees.

You can book a meeting here, or simply drop by – we have a private room at the back right of the restaurant (Luce) on the ground floor of the InterContinental.

June 8th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments

CloudMade Services Are Now Free – Sign Up Today

If you are a mobile or web developer – we have good news! As of today, when you sign up for a CloudMade developer account all of our services will be free of charge and will let you make money with location based advertising (LBA).

CloudMade’s services include:

Right after you sign up for a CloudMade developer account, you’ll also get LBA with revenue share and instant access to our 10,500-strong developer community to help you get started. To find out more about our mobile services and to sign up, click here. More about our web services can be found here.

Already have an ad partner or want an SLA? Get CloudMade Select

If you already have an ad partner and don’t want CloudMade ads in your app or you need an SLA then CloudMade Select is for you.

By signing up to this plan developers get a whole host of additional benefits including: guaranteed response times for support; guaranteed SLA; HTTP services access; HTTPs/SSL (coming soon); support for intranet apps and no user limits.

New Support Site Now Available

We’ve also just launched a new support site that contains FAQs, Forums and Issue Trackers – everything you need to build awesome apps.

May 16th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in developers | | 0 Comments

iPhone Static Framework

Problem with iPhone code sharing

As we all know Apple has not left developers opportunity to create frameworks for iPhone. However, there are a lot of situations when code has to be shared between different projects or even distributed to others developers.

Alternatives
There are a few approaches for the code sharing or distributing. Firstly, code can be shared/distributed as a source code. Although this approach is quite straightforward and XCode provides a good mechanism for including XCode project to another project, developers have to do some extra steps such as setup dependencies and path for headers. On the one hand it seems quite simple for the experienced developers, on the other it might be a problem for the new developers .

Second approach is to distribute code as a static library. This approach is well known and is used widely in Linux/Unix development thus a lot of developers are familiar with it. However, there are some disadvantages of using it in iPhone development which relate to dynamic nature of Objective-C. The problem is that static libraries are normally used for C/C++ code which has neither properties nor categories and so when, for example, Objective-C category is wrapped in static library a developer has explicitly to set additional linker options:

-ObjC
-all_load

If developer forgets to set the options mentioned above he will get runtime error “unrecognized selector sent to instance”

Static Framework
The most suitable alternative, in my opinion, is a ’static framework’. The idea behind is to force compiler to believe that it uses normal iPhone framework whereas shared libraries are substituted by static libraries. Thus if you have the code you want to share as a static library it is quite easy to transform it into a framework. Afterwords such framework can be added to a project without any extra efforts from the developer’s side.

How to create a Static framework
Since there is no option to build frameworks for iPhone in XCode I recommend using a static framework. To build it into XCode MacOS framework template should be used. Static framework has the same structure as a normal framework. Only a few extra steps have to be done:
link together static library for iPhone Simulator and iPhone Device
add file from the previous step to framework bundle

To make it easy we will write a shell script which does all the work. We will use a lipo utility which is distributed with XCode installation. This utility allows to link a few libraries into one file. Afterwords this file will be copied to the framework bundle and appropriate links will be created.

FRAMEWORK=”${BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR}/${PRODUCT_NAME}.framework”
lipo \”${BUILD_DIR}/${CONFIGURATION}-iphoneos/libDev.a” “${BUILD_DIR}/${CONFIGURATION}-iphonesimulator/lib Sim.a” -create -output “${FRAMEWORK}/Versions/Current/${PRODUCT_NAME}”cd “${FRAMEWORK}” && ln -sf “Versions/Current/${PRODUCT_NAME}” ./

This script should be added into a project as a build phase script through the project menu. As a result we get a static framework containing code which now can be easily shared.

LINKS

Mac OS Frameworks

lipo man page

Static Framework

May 10th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in api, developers, iPhone | | 0 Comments

New Mapzen Updates Make Editing Smoother and Faster

We’ve taken on board a lot of feedback and made lots of fixes and updates to Mapzen which we think will make a significant difference to your editing experience. They’re aimed at helping you map more by providing even greater flexibility within Mapzen.

Here’s what we’ve added:

1. Easier to work in areas with lots of land use

It’s now a lot easier to work more accurately with land use and other areas, with the ability to turn their filling on or off to provide a clearer view of what you are putting a perimeter around when viewing the satellite imagery or background images.

layer1

layer

2. Easier to align roads to satellite imagery

A new Hide/ Show Elements button has been added to the bottom of the editing window allowing you to quickly turn on / off elements to better see the background objects.  This is really useful when trying to align roads to satellite imagery.

all_elements_are_hidden[1]

3. More control when adding lines and areas

A much requested feature that you’ve all been waiting for.  Now you can press ESC to cancel any editing made to shapes of lines and press ‘Enter’ to end editing with line types.  This is really useful when adding new roads.

4. Mac Users: no more annoying zoom in / zoom out

If you have a magic mouse from Apple or use a MacBook touchpad you might have experienced sudden jumps in zoom level.  If you have suffered this problem, you can now disable the ‘scroll’ function to prevent the map from accidentally zooming in or out.

disable_scroll_touchpad[1]

We hope you’ll find these updates useful – please continue to email us feedback, it’s incredibly useful to help us evolve and improve Mapzen. Here’s how you can get in touch

The next Mapzen blog post will look at some new features coming up in the April release of Mapzen Beta.  Until then, if you don’t have a Mapzen account already, you can sign up for one and start using Mapzen here – happy mapping!

March 10th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in cartography, cloudmade, maps, mapzen, news, openstreetmap, products | | 0 Comments

Mapzen Updates and Sneak Preview of the Next Release

There’s been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make Mapzen, CloudMade’s family of easy to use OpenStreetMap editing tools, even easier, even more useful and even more fun to use. So what’s new?

Mapzen POI Collector 1.1 – Now in the App Store

Mapzen POI Collector is CloudMade’s smash hit iPhone mapping app that lets you easily and quickly add a huge range of places of interest to OpenStreetMap. The latest version includes numerous updates and improvements – all based on feedback we received from Mapzen users.

Mapzen POI Collector 1.1 lets you map faster and smarter:

  • Choose from over 45 new POI types based on user requests, including ‘Grit Bins’ for winter mapping, ‘Traffic Cams’ and many more
  • All POI icons are full color for a more vibrant mapping experience
  • Quickly find the POI type you are looking for with a slick new search feature
  • Add even more detail to the map with new attributes including disability access, seating capacity and religious denomination

Other bug fixes and enhancements:

  • GPS location functionality is faster and more reliable
  • Faster map loading with an enhanced map engine

screens_collapse

You can get the latest version for free from the App Store. Existing users can give feedback and help make Mapzen POI Collector even better.

Share your mapping adventures with the world

With the latest release of Mapzen, mappers can share their mapping adventures with friends and family or publish them for the whole world to see. An exciting cross between mapping and blogging, mappers can publish their mapping activity feed – which includes details of recently mapped areas as well as posts made by the user. Posts can range from short, Twitter style updates to longer, blog style entries that let mappers share their experiences. Mappers’ activity feeds are tagged with the location of their posts which means they can be used by other applications – like this demo shows.

dashboard_screen_actions

Stay up to date with your friends’ mapping activities

Mapzen now makes it easier than ever before to keep up to date with updates from your mapping network. Your Dashboard now includes a mapping activity feed from all of your mapping friends – so you know who’s been mapping what, where.

mapzen_users_activities

Map faster, worry less with the new Undo/Redo history panel

Mapzen’s undo and redo feature lets you map without having to worry about messing up anyone else’s work. Mistakes can be undone with the click of a button and now you can view a full history of your edits – making it easy to jump back to the exact point before it all went wrong.

mapzen_history_panel_views

Go to Mapzen to try out all the new features for yourself!

Coming Soon – What’s Next for Mapzen?

The next release of Mapzen Beta is just a few weeks away. We’ve been listening to your feedback to make it a better, faster, more fun tool to use. Mapzen Beta Belz includes these top requested features:

  • Natural features like lakes, forests or landuse zones and other areas can be tricky to map, with lots of overlapping layers getting in the way of each other. The next release of Mapzen gives mappers control over the appearance of natural features and other landuse areas, making it easier to map in places where lots of different types of landuse areas are required
  • Faster loading of Mapzen will let you quickly start mapping sessions and swap between the “View” and “Edit” modes
  • Ending line or shape features can be tricky in Mapzen – especially when you want to end a line that you’ve just added a point to. Keyboard controls in the next version of Mapzen will make it easy to end line and shape drawing.
  • Some Mac users have experienced problems with the scroll to zoom functions in Mapzen, especially when using an Apple Magic Mouse or MacBook or MacBook Pro touchpad. These problems will be fixed in the next release of Mapzen
1 2
3 4

If you can’t wait to try out Mapzen Beta Belz you can join the Mapzen Community Panel to have the chance to try out the latest features before they hit the web. Community Panel members get access to unreleased features and give feedback that makes Mapzen better for everyone.

Waiting for a feature that we haven’t talked about?

If you didn’t see the feature you want in the list for Mapzen Beta Belz, don’t worry. The features listed below are planned for the April release of Mapzen. We’d love to hear what you think about them. To provide feedback, comment on this post or send a mail to mapzen@cloudmade.com or check out the Mapzen forums.

  • Merging lines is a top requested feature that will appear in the April release of Mapzen
  • The presets panel is starting to get a bit crowded with all of the line, point and shape types that can be added. A handy search feature will make finding the right object easy
  • Hint strings will help new Mapzen users get started quickly and help existing users get more out of Mapzen
  • Mapzen can be slow sometimes – but don’t worry – we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves that will make mapping a lot faster

Tell us what you think

The Mapzen team want to know what you like and what you don’t like about Mapzen. There are loads of ways to get in touch with us:

February 20th, 2010 - Posted by Nick Black in cartography, cloudmade, mapzen, news, openstreetmap | | 1 Comments

CloudMade Takes Top Accolade at Mobile Premier Awards at Mobile World Congress

Nick with the Jury's Mobile Premier Award for Best Emerging Star


Tonight we were selected by a jury of prominent mobile industry leaders for the most prestigious accolade the mobile industry has to offer, Best Emerging Startup at the Mobile Premier Awards.

At a large event this evening at the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona, Nick Black, Co-founder & Head of Products at CloudMade, took to the stage to present CloudMade’s unique offering for mobile or web developers wishing to create and monetize compelling, best selling mobile applications and web sites. 600 companies from across the globe were in the running for this year’s awards, which recognize talented companies from the best grassroot startups.

Commenting on the win Nick said, “It’s a great honor to be recognized by the mobile industry elite as the Best Emerging Startup. We had formidable competitors which makes this award an even greater achievement. We’d like to thank the Silicon Valley Chapter of Mobile Monday for nominating us, our talented developer community which is so vital to the success of our company and the organizers of the awards themselves, for putting on an outstanding contest.”

CloudMade’s comprehensive and flexible mapping platform has been built from the ground up with the needs of mobile and web developers in mind. It empowers mobile and web developers by giving them the freedom to create and monetize exactly the type of apps they envision, and allows handset vendors and operators to take control of their own destiny by giving them a key control point to create successful consumer applications that blend maps, navigation, advertising, and local search.

The jury was made up of a number of industry heavyweights including: Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist with Vodafone Group Research & Development, Richard Wong, Partner Accel Partners and AdMob Board Member, Inmaculada Martinez, President of Stradbroke Advisors, and David Wood, Principal at Delta Wisdom and co-founder of Symbian.

For more information about the Mobile Premier Awards visit : http://www.mobilepremierawards.com/

February 15th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in events | | 0 Comments

If you’re at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Let’s meet up!

mwc

CloudMade is going to have a busy MWC, we’re meeting with press, developers, partners, investors and if you’re game,  you too! If you’d like to meet us come along to one of the below events or if you’re a developer why not come to one of our Developer Drop-In sessions we’re running daily where you can enjoy a coffee and pose your questions to our developer team.  CloudMade will have a table in the restaurant ‘Buffet – R2′ which is located here:

map

To reach the CloudMade table at MWC:First, enter the courtyard between building 1,2,4 and 5. Then, head out of the courtyard towards the area between building 1 and 2. Look for the place called “Restaurant Buffet”

Or if you are a FourSquare user? Get an impromptu meeting by searching for one of the team:

http://foursquare.com/user/nick_b
http://foursquare.com/user/copetersen
http://foursquare.com/user/cnilson

Sunday, 14 February
19:00– late  - Mobile Sunday – Come and socialize before the big event at the Mobile Sunday drinks evening. You’ll be able to recognize us from our CloudMade name tags and badges

Monday, 15 February
14.30-20:00 – Mobile Premier Awards – We’re presenting as a finalist but still want to catch up with as many people as we can after or during the event, so please come talk to use we’ll be wearing badges
11-12:30  - Developer Drop-In

Tuesday, 16 February
16-17:30 – Developer Drop-In

Wednesday, 17 February
16-17:30 – Developer Drop-In

Thursday, 18 February
11:00– 15:30 – WIPJam @ MWC – ‘Getting Cool Content from the Cloud’ (location: App Planet Auditorium (Hall 7))
16-17:30 – Developer Drop-In

February 9th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in cloudmade, developers, events | | 0 Comments

Ten Questions with Zsombor Szabo

Zsombor SzaboThis month we interview Zsombor Szabo from IZE. Zsombor has developed OpenMaps for iPhone using CloudMade tools. The CloudMade Coder caught up with him to find out more.

Tell us about your company or application(s)

My partner, Csongor Nemes, and I founded IZE in September 2008. We’re both enthusiastic about making the world a better place like other entrepreneurs. Having graduated with engineering degrees we both believed we had the skills to do that. Since then we delivered a really compelling application called OpenMaps.

route_OM

OpenMaps for iPhone is a fast and easy to use map application that uses open map data from OpenStreetMap.org. It’s intended to be used as a general-purpose map application, offering features such as: downloadable maps, navigation for car, pedestrian and cyclists and local search. We predict OSM will soon be the de facto map used by people around the world and so our goal is to make OpenMaps the best OSM application available.

How has CloudMade helped your development process? Which tools did you use?

We use two of CloudMade’s web services: CustomMap Tiles and Routing in OpenMaps. The custom map tiles gives users an option to view the OSM map in a different style if they aren’t satisfied with the default one. The Routing gives navigation data with turn-by-turn route instructions which OpenMaps displays elegantly to the user.

What new CloudMade products really excite you?

The soon to be released location based advertising service is on the top of my list. I am curious to find out exactly how it will work, what exact business model it will use and of course what the revenue sharing percentages will be.

The second is the forthcoming freeform search. Search is crucial for a data service to be successful. What is the point of having data if it can’t be searched properly? I applaud CloudMade for innovating with freeform search.

What impact do you think location based advertising will have on independent developers like you?

It wouldn’t be a wise decision to pass on that revenue stream in my opinion. Analysts predict it will be huge. I have the same opinion.

What do you think the next big thing will be in geo-enabled apps?

I honestly don’t know, but we have a bet on what it could be. We are building it now and it will be available as a feature in OpenMaps but we don’t want to talk about it until we will release it.

What will be bigger iPhone or Nexus?

I don’t think Nexus will be bigger than the iPhone. Maybe another Android handset.

Any tips for submitting apps to Apple or Google?

Yes. Follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and be sure to handle Location Services Denied errors if you are submitting an app that uses the device’s location services.

What developer publications / blogs / Tweeters do you read / follow?

I am @zssz on twitter and I follow some Mac nerds and devs too. Usually they inform me about new and noteworthy stuff that I need to know about in the Mac scene. Here are a few examples: @pilky @fraserspeirs @mattgemmell @nikf @mdhughes @ericasadun @iamleeg @thekarladam @bbum @scottstevenson @majicdave @joericioppo @wilshipley @alanQuatermain @ravenme @SteveStreza @mzarra @iTod @jeff_lamarche

What advice would you give other developers looking to emulate your success?

Be ambitious and strive for perfection.

Where does your company go from here?

The next big version of OpenMaps will include basic OSM editing. We are very excited about this. Imagine how cool it would be to be able to edit OpenStreetMap while on the go, modifying a bar’s tags while at that bar.

We have other big features planned too for OpenMaps and one of them is the reason we made the application in the first place. We’ve been developing it for over ~1.5 years now. Unfortunately I can’t reveal any more about it at this time. Only that it is coming and it will be BIG.

February 8th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in Featured Apps, cloudmade, developers | | 0 Comments

Going for Gold at Mobile World Congress

MPAFinal_logo

We recently found out that we’ve been selected as a finalist for the Mobile Premier Awards, the equivalent of the Oscars for mobile start-ups at the world’s largest mobile conference, Mobile World Congress.

The awards replace the popular Mobile Monday Peer Awards from which companies such as Fring, Plazes and Opera have risen to great heights.

This year’s awards have some heavy hitting sponsors including: BlackBerry, 02 Limtus, RCR Wireless, Mashable and Tech Crunch and if past year’s events are anything to go by, will attract the most influential movers and shakers of the mobile industry.

mPA

It’s by no means a small feat to be selected as a finalist considering the quality of the other 250 start-ups that were initially chosen, including companies such as Layar and Waze.

CloudMade was voted by the Silicon Valley chapter of Mobile Monday as its nomination for the awards. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the chapter for choosing us and plan to follow through on stage with a compelling presentation when we pitch our products and company to leading VC’s, handset makers, operators and press.

We feel that we’ve made it to the finals because of our unique product offerings, including our comprehensive and flexible mapping platform which is the only one available built solely for developers. It empowers mobile and web developers by giving them the freedom to create exactly the type of apps they envisage, and allows handset vendors and operators to take control of their own destiny, by giving them a key control point for their mobile business to make successful business ventures.

Combine this with our innovative mapping tools that allow anyone to easily contribute to OpenStreetMap, and we’re well on the way to the democratization of geo data and expanding access to it.

Good luck to the other start-ups and we look forward to taking to the stage on February 15th in Barcelona. We hope you can join us.

For more information or to register for The Mobile Premier Awards click here

Here’s more about our latest product offerings:

Data Market Place, a market place offering a wide variety of rich, pre-integrated third-party commercial datasets for developers to add to CloudMade maps.

Navi Studio, a suite of tools that make it simple to build fully featured turn-by-turn navigation apps for all major mobile platforms.

iPhone SDK, allows developers to add customized maps, geocoding and routing to iPhone applications with ease.

Mapzen and Mapzen POI Collector, allow anyone to easily contribute to OpenStreetMap and share their experiences via Facebook and Twitter

January 30th, 2010 - Posted by Paul Jarratt in cloudmade, developers, events, geodata, iPhone, mapzen, news | | 0 Comments

Next Page »