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
Product Blog - Two New pre-Alpha APIs from CloudMade
Last week we took the covers off our new CloudMade website - if you haven’t had a look already, head over to CloudMade.com and see for yourself.
We also released two new APIs as pre-Alpha services: theWeb Maps API and the Mobile Maps API. Right now these services are targeted at developers who want to get their hands on the very latest things we have to offer. Both APIs are accessed by directly calling our tile server, though the observant amongst you will probably have noticed slippy maps present on lots of our pages. We’ll be releasing documentation for the slippy map API shortly, so watch this space.
We’re particularly excited about the Mobile Maps API, which gives developers access to a set of tiles which we’ve started to optimize for mobile use. By reducing the tile size to 64×64 pixels (rather than the usual 256×256) and simplifying the cartography we’re keeping tile sizes down to around 2-3kB. This is a first pass and we hope to get the sizes down even more to help mobile applications save on costly bandwidth and enhance user experience.
Because both these services are built on top of OpenStreetMap data you can use them in almost any way you like. Most other online map providers don’t let you use their maps in mobile devices or for real time routing or tracking or outside of their own APIs, for example. We want you to use CloudMade maps for the coolest things you can think of.
If you are itching to play with either the Web or Mobile Maps API, you can request an API key here - I can’t promise that you’ll get access straight away, but we will get back to you as soon as the API is ready. We’ve also got a developers mailing list which you can sign up to here.
Both images based on map data created by OpenStreetMap.org contributors and licensed CCBYSA.
June 4th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in api, cloudmade, geodata, news, products, tools | | 0 Comments
