iPhone Developer VIP Party – June 10th 9.30pm San Francisco
Tonight CloudMade is excited to sponsor the iPhone Developer VIP Party at Swig bar in San Francisco. Doors open at 9.30 and we expect a full house!
CloudMade has been active at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference this week, engaging with iPhone developers who are creating the next great mapping and location-aware applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Tonight we’re looking forward to talking with many of you one-on-one to discuss your vision on the future of location-aware apps. We also want to find out what features you’d like to see on the iPhone, web and other mobile platforms. Over a Maptini, of course!
Starting with our rich, crowd-sourced maps, CloudMade gives iPhone developers an easier way to build more immersive mapping applications than Apple’s MapKit. Developers will find our suite of iPhone supported Libraries gives you easy access to CloudMade services while supporting a number of unique features like vector data and MapSafe location management service. CloudMade’s non-restrictive licensing even allows for advanced services such as routing, geocoding or tracking functionality – without having to call a lawyer or break the bank.
So if you’re a developer looking for better ways to incorporate maps and location into your app, sign up for a API key at CloudMade’s Developer Zone and get started today. Adding customized CloudMade maps will delight your users and make your app stand-out from the crowd!
For mapping success on the iPhone and iPod Touch, just add:
- Crowd-Sourced Maps
- CloudMade Geo APIs
- Your Cool Application
June 10th, 2009 - Posted by Cragg Nilson in Uncategorized, api, cloudmade, developers, events, maps, openstreetmap, tools | | 1 Comments
A Week of Changesets
One of the new features in OpenStreetMap’s API 0.6 is changesets, which track the bounding box of the edits associated with them. You can check out how useful this feature is at the changeset browser page, or the user edits page. But it isn’t easy to get an overview of editing activity directly from the browser page, so here’s an animation showing all the changesets as they’re created (red) and closed (green) and fade away. You can download the full version here.
Kudos to our German contributors for their relentlessly energetic pace!
May 8th, 2009 - Posted by Matt Amos in openstreetmap | | 0 Comments
New OSM db server “smaug” – First Pics!
Let’s cut to the chase – you all want to see pictures of the new OpenStreetMap core database server, and here it is:
It’s got blue LEDs on the front. It must be good.
For the techies amongst us, you’ll probably want to know some juicy specs – 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon E5420 processors, 32 Gigabytes of DDR2 RAM, 10 450Gb 15k SAS disks for the database (and another 2 73Gb disks for the operating system). All in all, a worthy machine to sit at the heart of OpenStreetMap, storing all the geodata and powering all kinds of things. You can see more pictures of the machine as it was being unboxed.
Thanks go of course to everyone who contributed to the recent OpenStreetMap foundation donation drive, and we can’t wait to see it up and running with the next version of the OSM API in a few weeks time. Once Matt has finished deafening everyone in the CloudMade London Office (as he “tries it out”) it’ll be moved to its permanent home in UCL to join the rest of the OSM servers.
March 27th, 2009 - Posted by Andy Allan in news, openstreetmap | | 1 Comments
A Summary of the Future of Mapping
Over the last few days we’ve launched the CloudMade Developer Programme in front of packed audiences in San Francisco and London. There was a real buzz at both events – a feeling that the tools and services we’ve been working on are going to make a real difference to developers.
There’s a lot of anticipation at CloudMade about the applications that can be built using our mapping APIs. If you’re looking for inspiration, you need a quick recap, or you couldn’t make it to the events, read on to find out more.
February 16th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in api, clients, cloudmade, developers, openstreetmap, products, talks | | 6 Comments
(Nearly) Live Tiles
Waiting to see your edits is boring. Worse than that, it delays the sense of satisfaction that comes with seeing your contributions and reduces the addictiveness of mapping.
At CloudMade, we’ve been running prototype (nearly) live updating tile servers internally for a while, but we thought it would be nice to share these with the community. This sandbox tile server is updated from the minute diffs and runs approximately 10 minutes behind the main database, due to the time necessary to dump the diffs, download and import them. You can see the results here by switching back and forth between the minutely layer and the weekly layer. (Thanks to Shaun for the continuous stream of edits!)
If you’re looking at an area and you think that it should be updated, try hitting the permalink and refreshing a few times, as your browser may be showing you cached tiles.
Please feel free to use these tiles, but remember that this is an experimental sandbox – please don’t download tiles in bulk. The server will be slow under high load so, please, if you see a warning message then come back a few minutes later.
Enjoy!
January 23rd, 2009 - Posted by Matt Amos in openstreetmap | | 18 Comments
An Animated Year of Edits on OSM
We were inspired by ITO’s “a year of edits on OSM“, but thought that it needed a little extra something – animation!
Or view the high-res original.
December 15th, 2008 - Posted by Matt Amos in openstreetmap | | 0 Comments
Where’s interesting?
Visualising geographic statistics usually means drawing a coloured map (called a choropleth), but this can be confusing as the human brain tends to associate importance with the area covered. For example, first impressions of the choropleth for the U.S. presidential elections would give the misleading impression that the Republicans won, as 56% of the map pixels are red. However, there is a different style of maps (called cartograms) in which the map is warped such that the area is proportional to the data being visualised.
We can use cartograms of OpenStreetMap data to present a more visually striking and interesting view of the world. For example, here is a cartogram of the distribution of Points of Interest (POIs). It is immediately obvious that most of the POIs in the world are either in the United Kingdom or Germany, but there are other interesting POI-rich pockets; the Philippines, Brasil, South Africa and Eastern Australia. Many thanks to all the contributors in these areas for their fantastic work!
November 7th, 2008 - Posted by Matt Amos in openstreetmap, tips, tools | | 4 Comments
Developer Watch – CloudMade Maps in your API
There are a lot of mapping APIs out there giving developers a lot of choice. Some are simple and lightweight, like our Web Maps Lite and some are incredibly fully featured, like the awesome OpenLayers. The image below is a screenshot from John McKerrell’s maps page, which uses MultiMap’s Open API to display several different layers, including our standard web, mobile and no-names layers. Click on the image below to take a look for yourself.
Its great to see developers like John mixing and matching layers like this – its exactly what we had in mind when we started to put together our tile server. We want to help OpenStreetMap’s goal of letting people do interesting and unexpected things with map data. So long as you respect the terms of OpenStreetMap’s CC-by-SA license and attribute CloudMade when you use our maps, you can use our tiles in any web, mobile or desktop client.
If you do something cool with CloudMade maps, let us know.
August 5th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in api, cloudmade, openstreetmap, tools | | 0 Comments
San Francisco Bay Area Developers’ Evening
Our first developers’ evening will be held at 18.30pm on the the 31st July at our Menlo Park offices. Anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area who has an interest in location aware applications, mapping, GPS and free data is invited to attend the event, which is guaranteed to include insight, intrigue, sneak-previews and free pizza.
OpenStreetMap and CloudMade founder, Steve Coast, will share his insights into the world of collaborative map making, talking about why the world needs free and open geodata, why traditional models of map making are not cut out for a world where maps form a core part of everyday life. You’ll hear how your applications can benefit from the rich map data that OpenStreetMap has to offer.
From mobile phones, to satellite navigation, from mashups to social networks – maps are everywhere. Yet most of the maps we use each day are owned by two companies – Tom-Tom and Nokia. We think that maps are too important to be controlled by a handful of governments and companies. Everyday tens of thousands of OpenStreetMap volunteers around the world are helping to liberate map data by making maps which can be used free of charge by anyone, anywhere in the world for almost any use you can imagine.
By packaging OpenStreetMap data into a set of high quality, professional products and services, CloudMade are shaking up the existing market place. CloudMade co-founder, Nick Black, will talk about their existing APIs which allow developers to embed high quality maps in web and mobile applications as well as talking about future plans for some exciting new APIs and services.
Developers will have the opportunity to talk to the CloudMade team who will be on hand to answer questions about their current and future plans over a slice of pizza and a drink.
Registration for this event is free. To register, click here.
For more information, email nick@cloudmade.com
July 24th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in events, geodata, openstreetmap, products, talks | | 2 Comments
CloudMade Release Isle of Man Dataset to OpenStreetMap
We’ve been in Limerick, Ireland for The State of The Map, the OpenStreetMap conference where we took the opportunity to announce the release of a complete mapping dataset of the Isle of Man to OpenStreetMap.
The dataset was collected by CloudMade in late 2007 using all of the tools and processes used by OpenStreetMap mappers. The team, made up of CloudMade founders Steve Coast and Nick Black along with long-term OSM contributor, Andy Robinson, drove and cycled every road on the Isle of Man, recording their movements with cheap, consumer grade GPS units whilst taking photos of street signs with digital cameras.
The finished map
Donating the Isle of Man data to OpenStreetMap is the completion of a cycle for us. We set out to prove that it was possible for three guys with bicycles and GPS units using OpenStreetMap’s software, to do what the Ordnance Survey or TeleAtlas do, but at a fraction of the cost. If I wanted to make a map, I would use OpenStreetMap’s software. If I wanted to make a better map, I’d give it to the OpenStreetMap community and let them maintain it. The real test will be to come back in 6 months and see how many footpaths and new housing estates have been added to the map.
Detailed view of Peel, a city on the west coast of the Island which shows the street network as well as a selection of points of interest.
The dataset is significant for a few reasons. The Isle of Man will become the second country to be completely mapped in OSM, following the donation of the complete Netherlands road network to OSM by Dutch map makers AND. Secondly, the Isle of Man has been overlooked in the past by most online map providers, who do not consider the small nation to be a high priority.
The import process is being managed by OSMer Dan Karran and we expect it to be a few weeks until the data is available in OSM. In the mean time, you can get a sneak preview over here.
A full press is available here.
July 15th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in cloudmade, geodata, openstreetmap | | 5 Comments
