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

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

• Leave a post in the Mapzen forums
• Report a bug on the Mapzen issue tracker
• Send us a mail to mapzen@cloudmade.com
• Get in touch with Nick, Yuliya or Anton through Mapzen

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

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!

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:

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

This 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.

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