Here’s what we’ve added:

1. Easier to work in areas with lots of land use

It’s now a lot easier to work more accurately with land use and other areas, with the ability to turn their filling on or off to provide a clearer view of what you are putting a perimeter around when viewing the satellite imagery or background images.

2. Easier to align roads to satellite imagery

A new Hide/ Show Elements button has been added to the bottom of the editing window allowing you to quickly turn on / off elements to better see the background objects.  This is really useful when trying to align roads to satellite imagery.

3. More control when adding lines and areas

A much requested feature that you’ve all been waiting for.  Now you can press ESC to cancel any editing made to shapes of lines and press ‘Enter’ to end editing with line types.  This is really useful when adding new roads.

4. Mac Users: no more annoying zoom in / zoom out

If you have a magic mouse from Apple or use a MacBook touchpad you might have experienced sudden jumps in zoom level.  If you have suffered this problem, you can now disable the ‘scroll’ function to prevent the map from accidentally zooming in or out.

We hope you’ll find these updates useful – please continue to email us feedback, it’s incredibly useful to help us evolve and improve Mapzen. Here’s how you can get in touch

• 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

The next Mapzen blog post will look at some new features coming up in the April release of Mapzen Beta.  Until then, if you don’t have a Mapzen account already, you can sign up for one and start using Mapzen here – happy mapping!

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

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/

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

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.

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

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.

OffMaps – Offline maps on your iPhone or iPod touch

OffMaps is the smash hit iPhone application that lets you take your maps with you when you’re overseas and roaming. It’s also the perfect companion for iPod Touch users who’ve been buying OffMaps in droves.

OffMaps uses many of CloudMade’s iPhone SDK’s features including geocoding, local search, walking and vehicle directions to create a best selling user experience.

Dopplr – Social iPhone Travel Gudie

Dopplr is a must-have service for regular travellers and their free iPhone app is a must have for iPhone owners who travel regularly. Dopplr iPhone makes use of CloudMade’s Style Editor to add beautifully customised maps to the application.

CBS – Do Cameras Make Intersections More Dangerous?

Its not just iPhone apps that can benefit from CloudMade’s geo platform. Global broadcaster CBS have just started using Web Maps Studio – a suite of tools designed to make it easy for web developers to add customised maps, content and more to websites. The CBS Red Light Cameras site took only hours to put together and demonstrates how easy it is to use Web Maps Studio to create a customized, great looking sites that overlay content on maps.

Oakland Crimespotting – How safe is your neighbourhood?

Oakland Crimespotting is a fascinating site that lets Oakland residents – or anyone else – view crime statistics for the city. The site uses a custom map style, created using the Style Editor to give visitors a unique experience. The site’s creators, choose to using CloudMade’s Specialist Toolkit – a range of tools and APIs that let advanced geo developers create highly customised map based applications.

Find out more about building applications that use CloudMade’s geo platform.

Union Square, San Francisco in Mapzen POI Collector

Mapzen POI Collector’s fast, easy to use POI menu

Stay tuned for more Mapzen news coming soon.

The latest version mirrors the geocoding API V2 by exposing two simple methods for forward and reverse geocoding, along with one method to access tiles, and yet another to access routing API. Clear and concise – just the way Perl is. Check out examples at http://search.cpan.org/~gdm/Geo-Cloudmade-0.2/lib/Geo/Cloudmade.pm.