Join the Mapzen Community Panel to experience CloudMade’s exciting new mapping environment at a hands-on preview session

Join the Mapzen Community Panel and be the first to experience Mapzen – CloudMade’s new powerful and easy-to-use map making environment.

Over the next few weeks we’re inviting current and new Mapzen Community Panel members to take part in hands-on testing sessions of Mapzen. The sessions will be held at our London and Menlo Park offices and will give you the chance to be the first to experience this exciting new map making tool.

You don’t need to be a mapping expert to join the Mapzen Community Panel. In fact we’re looking for people with all levels of abilities, from experienced OpenStreetMap mappers, to total newbies. As a Mapzen Community Panel member you get early access to new Mapzen releases and the chance to take part in one-on-one hands on previews with the Mapzen team.

We know how busy you are and value your input so if you take part in a one on one session we will compensate you for your time and travel expenses (and you get to take home some exclusive CloudMade goodies). Most importantly, this is your opportunity to experience Mapzen and shape the future of an exciting new product.

We are particularly interested to talk to anyone who has used other OpenStreetMap editors in the past, but found them difficult or confusing to use.

To apply to join the Mapzen Community Panel and take part in either the London or Menlo Park testing sessions, click here.

London Session Times
Wednesday 19th August – 12.00-20.00
Thursday 20th August – 12.00-18.00

Menlo Park Session Times
These will take place in the week beginning 24th August. The dates will be updated here soon.

August 11th, 2009 - Posted by Emma Williamson in Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

Building the Map

Whether you saw it at State of the Map or in the posting below, many of you have seen and commented on Mapzen, CloudMade’s upcoming web-based mapping tool.  We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from people on what they like and what they’d like to see.  I am pretty excited about it.  We hope that it will introduce more people into the OSM community, accelerate the growth of the map worldwide and also improve the quality of the map by making it easier to add the attributes that sometimes aren’t seen but really make the map work.

CloudMade is committed to helping the OpenStreetMap community build the best map in the world.  That goes right to our roots and our founders’ passion for OSM.  With Mapzen we are building the next generation of mapping tool, that will greatly improve mapping for existing mappers and make it easier for new mappers to get started with mapping. This will help ensure the best of community mapping, rapid response and map quality.  We think Mapzen is a great step in that direction and offer it to the community in that spirit.

As many of you know, CloudMade’s Community Ambassadors have been working very hard to build the map through outreach to local groups, holding mapping parties and working on behalf of OSM at trade shows and conferences. This has helped spread the word on OSM in selected regions in the US, but in the process we have learned that we can get a wider reach by working with larger national and local community groups. Based on this, we have made the decision to dissolve the ambassador team and build a team that will focus on partnering with national and local groups, support finding and importing public data and communicating local success stories.

Going forward, CloudMade will be actively working with national and local groups to promote OSM and community mapping.  We are working with the Geo-Georgia group on a very cool project to map the city of Atlanta in a weekend (September 11-13, if you want to help). The goal is to make Atlanta a showcase city for the OSM map and there’s a great team of people working on that. You’ll hear more about that as the time gets closer.

Our goal here is simple:  Build the Community.  Build the Map. We hope that our efforts can make a difference, but the community will build the map.  If you know of ways you can help us in that, or ways we can help you, let us know. Send a message to community@cloudmade.com.

July 23rd, 2009 - Posted by Marc Prioleau in Uncategorized | | 6 Comments

How To Get Forward Geocoding in iPhone MapKit

The CoreLocation and MapKit sessions at WWDC yesterday gave an insight to some of the powerful technology that the iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone 3G S will bring to application developers. The new compass and enhanced accelerometer support that the combination of new hardware and software bring were a big hit with the WWDC crowd. The incomplete feature sets around MapKit were less of a hit.

MapKit seeks to be a very well implemented iPhone mapping library, that lets developers add Google maps to their iPhone applications as well as perform reverse geocoding. Sadly for iPhone developers, the fun stops with reverse geocoding. Forward geocoding (the process of turning an address into a latitude and longitude) is not available in MapKit. The reasons for this lie in complex licensing agreements between Apple, Google and TomTom (who own all of the map data that Google and Apple use). CloudMade will help you avoid the complexity.

iPhone Developers at WWDC were urged to use external geocoding services by the iPhone engineering team. CloudMade’s geocoding service fits the bill perfectly. iPhone developers can integrate CloudMade’s geocoding web-services directly into their MapKit applications, without worrying about breaking and terms of service. The geocoding web service looks like this:

http://geocoding.cloudmade.com/BC9A493B41014CAABB98F0471D759707/
geocoding/find/moscone center west.html

Lets take a closer look at the URL:

http://geocoding.cloudmade.com/ – the base URL

BC9A493B41014CAABB98F0471D759707/ – your API key, available here

geocoding/find – the “find” method, more docs here

moscone center west – the text string to search for

.html choose from HTML or JSON output.

Click here to see the result.

You can find our more about CloudMade’s geocoding services here.

June 12th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in REST, Uncategorized, api, developers, iPhone, products | | 8 Comments

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

Mapping with the kids

I took my children to a mapping party last weekend in Milton Keynes (UK).  My daughters are 4, 6 and 8 years old.  We had three GPSs, three scooters, 2 cameras and a pad of paper.

My girls had mapped with me before near our home, but always incidental mapping (i.e. we were going on a bike ride or walk and did a bit of mapping).   This was the first time we would have an assigned area to look at.

So, for those of you who want to map and have kids you don’t want to neglect, here is what I learned:

• Bring some toys (in my case each girl had a back pack and a nintendo and/or ipod).  The times you spend talking to other adults and/or working on the computer are pretty dull to watch.
• Bring a GPS for each person…  The kids love mapping and will happily run down that trail you want mapped and back (when your legs are too tired).  Each kid wants to hold a GPS and they make you alot more effective with limitless energy.
  [Note to tools developers, the ability to overlay multiple traces would be very useful... ]
• Map something they can enjoy…  So, we got to do Campbell park in Milton Keynes…  They could play, run, have fun…  Sitting in a car while daddy did the parking lots and bus stops on the way over was not much fun for them…
• Two 2 hour sessions is alot of mapping for a kid…  mine managed two ninety minute sessions with a longish lunch in the middle.  Plan for more down time
• The kids will notice things that should be mapped that you might not…  Mapping stuff kids find important, means making a map that is meaningful to families…
• Finally: Mappers are very nice to kids Everyone seemed a bit suprised, but pleased to see them…

Overall, if you map and have kids…  Take them to a party.  They will love it, you will see new things to map through their eyes and they can make you more effective while on foot (in particular).

Mapping with kids in Milton Keynes

May 19th, 2009 - Posted by Jim Brown in Uncategorized | | 10 Comments

CloudMade Developer Zone Launches This Evening

CloudMade’s Developer Zone launches in San Francisco this evening. We’ll be releasing several new sets of APIs that will let developer build awesome new location based tools. Stay tuned to this blog or follow us on twitter.

If you’re in Europe and couldn’t make it along to the San Francisco, there’s a London event happening next Thursday – see here for details.

February 6th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments

In-car navigation with OpenStreetMap data

In-car, on-bike and on-foot navigation is the goal of a few different OpenStreetMap projects at the moment. By offering free downloads of routable data formats from our downloads site we’re aiming to support routing in OSM.

The idea of the downloads site is to provide easy to access OSM geodata for all of the countries of the world to give a helping hand to people who want to use OSM data and hopefully lower the barriers to entry for people who want to do cool things with OSM. Last week we added a new file format to the downloads area – Navit format data. Navit is an open source (GPL) in-car navigation system that does lots of the things other in-car navigation software does – routing you from place to place calculating time and distance, with a rich set of map data that comes from OSM. Navit is very much a work in progress – its not ready for general use yet, but if you an intrepid mapper of hacker it could be just what you’ve been looking for.

Calling Mappers and Hackers

If open source in-car navigation, powered by OSM’s open geodata sounds like your sort of thing, there are a few different ways you can try out Navit. The project’s wiki has details of the program running on various Linux based devices like the Nokia n800, the Asus eee PC or the OpenMoko Neo. We tried it out on an Ubuntu laptop which lacked the ability to make the most of Navit’s OpenGL powered 3D rendering. Even in 2D, being able to route through the streets of Munich whilst sitting at a desk on a Friday afternoon was a lot of fun.

Mappers – grab a Navit file for your country from downloads.cloudmade.com and head over to the Navit wiki for help getting Navit setup. Try routing through an area you know well and see what the result is. Maybe there are few one-way streets you’ve missed out

Hackers – Take a look at the Navit mailing list or jump on their IRC channel to see how you can help.

Downloads from CloudMade

Our downloads service includes the following files, by country:

• OSM XML – Raw OpenStreetMap data
• Garmin error files – special edition files for Garmin GPS units that highlight errors in OSM data, such as un-named roads.
• Shapefiles – OpenStreetMap data in one of the most widespread geodata formats

If there’s a geodata format you’d like us to support, please get in touch

September 20th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized | | 3 Comments

CloudMade’s Andy Allan wins Cartography Award

Great news from the British Cartographic Society, who have awarded CloudMade Tech Lead, Andy Allan an award for his work on the OpenCycleMap. OpenCycleMap.org was awarded a Commended Award in the Avenza Eelectronic Mapping category of the British Cartographic Society’s annual awards which were held in the UK last week.

OpenCycleMap.org is a specialist map created for cyclists. It uses data from OpenStreetMap.org to highlight cyclepaths, bike parks, cycle shops and other features that are relevant to cyclists

Unfortunately Andy couldn’t make it to the awards ceremony to pick up his prize as he was en-route from Aberdeen, having represented OpenCycleMap and CloudMade at the Society of Cartographers Summer School. The award was collected by long-term cartographer, Steve Chilton, who helped Andy put together the application for the award. Speaking on the OpenStreetMap mailing list, Steve wrote:

Andy will be at FOSS4G 2008 in Cape Town at the end of September, so if you are heading to South Africa for the event make sure you drop Andy a line.

Note: CloudMade are pleased to be sponsoring Andy’s work on the cycle map by providing web hosting and tile serving for the project. If you go to OpenCycleMap.org and start to dig into Andy’s code, you’ll see that tile requests are being made to *.andy.sandbox.cloudmade.com. Sandboxes are testing grounds for personal development projects of people at CloudMade and are not our production servers. We don’t make any promises about uptime, speed or reliability or Sandbox services, but if you want to see the cool stuff first, its the place to look.

September 8th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized | | 12 Comments

Developer Watch – CloudMade Mobile Maps Available via Umap Flash/Flex Component

Its always great to hear about our maps being used in the wild. Advanced Flash Components are a Colorado based software house who specialise in Flash/Flex components. Today they added support for CloudMade’s Mobile Maps API to their UMap library:

Click on the image to read more

AFC have got some great technology and we’re looking forward to working with them on more projects in the near future. If you need mobile Flash maps, check out AFC right away.

July 8th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

Garmin OpenStreetMap GPS Map Downloads

We’ve just launched a new area of our site – downloads.cloudmade.com – which hosts various maps for most countries of the world including OpenStreetMap XML, Osmosis country boundaries and Garmin GPS maps, all available for free download. We’re particularly excited about the Garmin GPS maps, which have been specially designed to highlight errors and omissions in OpenStreetMap maps by drawing attention to roads that do not have names. The maps are targeted at OpenStreetMap mappers – we hope that it will make mapping in busy urban areas a little bit easier.

All of the files at downloads.cloudmade.com are free and are provided under OpenStreetMap’s Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License.

The maps were made using Steve Radcliffe’s Mkgmap utility which takes OSM data and outputs a Garmin file in combination with some perl scripts written by OSM’s Richard Fairhurst. So big thanks to Richard, Steve and of course to the whole OSM community. The glue on CloudMade’s side was done by Andy Allan who came up with the idea of Garmin GPS maps that highlight errors in OSM data. Andy modified some existing OSM tools, which can all be found here. Andy’s going to post some more thoughts about the process to the CloudMade dev list – so sign up to find out more.

The maps are created from the latest OSM data we have and will updated every Thursday – all of the files have bookmarkable names so you can easily get hold of teh latest maps.

Head over to downloads.cloudmade.com and see what you can do with the maps.

June 26th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in Uncategorized | | 3 Comments