Going for Gold at Mobile World Congress

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.

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

Making Mapzen Even Easier and More Fun to Use

Its just over a month since we launched Mapzen – the easy to use OpenStreetMap editor. Since then, the intuitive user interface and focus on ease of use has caught the attention of users and the media (see New Scientist, Mac World, ZDNet and our own Press Zone). Over the holidays we released a set of updates to Mapzen that address many of the comments early users have made. Here’s a summary of the updates that were made in the “Mapzen Beta Uhniv” release, on the 24th December 2009:

Bug fixes

One of the biggest problems reported by some Mapzen users was with saving data – the annoying “Oops – a big error has occurred” problem was our highest priority for this release. We tracked down all of the known causes of this problem and they are now be fixed for good. We also added an automatic reporting system – so Mapzen will tell us if it incurs any problems when saving or editing data. Other bug fixes included more reliable loading of satellite imagery and more reliable rendering of lines – stopping the problems that occasionally made lines disappear.

Giving you more space to work

No-one likes working in a small, constrained screen space, so we increased the size of the work area in Mapzen:

More objects to edit

There are thousands of different types of map features in OpenStreetMap – each often with several variations and combinations. WIth Mapzen we boil all of this choice down to the features and attributes you need for mapping. With each release of Mapzen we’ll add some new map features, modify others and even remove features or attributes that user do not find useful. In this release of Mapzen we added loads of new features, including:

• New icons for a whole load of exciting features including funicular railways, gondolas and drag lifts – just in time for the skiing season
• New icons for boundaries including city walls, fences, hedge lines and gates
• New landuse types including scrub
• New POIs including drinking water and recycling

New features make map editing in ski resorts easy

Another hugely requested feature was clearer one-way arrows for roads, also updated in this release:

Coming up next

The next release of Mapzen will focus on improving usability – particularly the way in which users interact with roads. For example, we know you find it annoying to have to click once to select a node and again to drag it when you are re-shaping a road, so we’ll be updating this behaviour so that to make it easier and quicker for you to drag and re-align roads – something that all the TIGER editors out there spend a lot of time doing.

We’ve also heard that users in areas with a landuse shapes can find it hard to edit roads. To solve this problem we’ll be adding controls that let you turn off landuse – making it far easier to edit roads in these areas. We’ll post some screenshots as soon as we have working internal versions.

What else?

There are lots of exciting features in the queue for Mapzen from speed enhancements to improved hints to merging of ways to easier selection of map features. We’ll be releasing a poll in the next few weeks that will let you choose which features you want to see implemented first – so stay tuned.

In the meantime you can leave feedback about Mapzen or report bugs at the Mapzen Issue Tracker or you can get in touch via email.

January 4th, 2010 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized, cloudmade, mapzen, news, openstreetmap, products | | 4 Comments