Developer Sophie Herrman joins Mapbox in Washington, D.C.! Sophie is joining me on our growing labs team, doing crazy design, building experimental apps, and applying her skills to our outside marketing.
She’s coming to Mapbox from the energy industry, where she worked on sales and marketing platforms while earning her degree in Human Geography at Buffalo State College. Her degree focuses on cultural area studies, propensity modeling, and geographies of developing countries.
Skybox is building direct Mapbox integration into their new BusBoy platform.
We shipped a new layout for our developer documentation.
The layout provides focused left fixed navigation and better search. Let us know what else we could add to our documentation to make Mapbox even better for developers, just ping us @mapbox on twitter.
Image scientist Amit Kapadia joins the Mapbox team in San Francisco! Amit will be jumping in as an imagery specialist, working alongside Charlie, Bruno, Sean, and myself on the Satellite team. Previously, Amit has worked in software development, image processing, and public outreach for several NASA observatories. Most recently, Amit was a Citizen Science developer for Zooniverse at the Adler Planetarium.
Hello Austin! Just landed with Garrett for a few days at SXSW. We are presenting tomorrow on “Beyond Dots on a Map: The Future of Mapping Tweets”, which is basically me showing off the awesome design of mapping 3 Billion Tweets work by Eric Fisher + the great UI by Tom MacWright.
My co-presenter, Ian Cairns from our friends @Gnip, will talk about where all this Twitter data came from, sharing hand-drawn blueprints of what the geodata in the Twitter firehose looks like, and talking about how Gnip approaches building APIs for companies to then filter this huge pile of data.
We only have 3 days...
Most importantly, we will be eating BBQ and drinking Shiner for the next 3 days. As this is Garrett’s first time to Austin, our friend Connor Montgomery at Pinterest made a board of all the BBQ joints we need to hit up.
If you want to talk maps, get a peek on some of the latest stuff we are working on with routing and vector terrain, or want to just drink, hit us up on Twitter at @Mapbox or just ping me (@ericg) and Garrett (@heyitsgarrett). And if you’re just feeling the need for BBQ, you know where to find us.
VSCO, makers of tools for creating beautiful photographs, launched a completely custom branded map to compliment their Grid search, forming an elegant, quiet backdrop behind their users' photographs.
You can now edit OpenStreetMap directly from your Mapbox Streets map with today’s roll out of improved info controls for Mapbox.js. If you’re using an OpenStreetMap-based layer like Mapbox Streets and the new Mapbox.js 1.6.2, you will find an “Improve this map” link. Clicking on it will lead you all the way to OpenStreetMap to edit the map. The control is smart: it’ll jump to exactly the same spot on OpenStreetMap as you were viewing on the Mapbox map. Any changes to OpenStreetMap will appear within minutes on Mapbox Streets. If you’re in a hurry, you can make a quick note on the map instead — so other editors can fix the issues.
Try the new info controls for yourself for instance on this map.
On March 20, come celebrate the opening of Mapbox in San Francisco! RSVP here. We’ll get started at 6:30pm with a keg each of PBR & Anchor Steam, plus some local eats. We’ll go until we kick the kegs. Hope to see you there!
This quick shot by Skybox’s SkySat-1 shows multiple planes landing at Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK) airport in Beijing on December 30, 2013. You can easily see a large plane landing on the runway at right. Using the video’s timestamp and public flight logs, Bruno identified this plane as Air China Limited flight 1310, a wide-body Airbus 330 flying from Guangzhou to Beijing. Operating as a codeshare, that flight was also listed as Shenzhen Airlines 1310, United Airlines 7564, SAS 9510, Austrian 8010 and Lufthansa 7283.
Skybox’s constellation of micro-satellites is putting out the world’s first commercial, high-resolution, HD video of Earth from space. Here you can see Mapbox Streets paired with this video from SkySat-1.
The new vector based Mapbox Terrain layer we are designing lets us style and combine datasets in ways that were previously not possible. For example, we can now integrate contour lines with elevation labels layered on top of Mapbox Satellite — and make it fast for the entire world. The elevation data reveals the third dimension on otherwise flat imagery, providing a new perspective for a hiker planning their routes, or a drone pilot maneuvering their craft. While we are still working on the design, the combination is stunning.
Grand Canyon National Park, AZ. View fullscreen map.
It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of Pinterest and their push to build a completely custom map experience. They just rolled out a small update to their website that takes advantage of the excellent Leaflet.markercluster plugin to show images of pinned places right on the map.
With a bit of customization using the iconCreateFunction, the markers pull in each pin’s image and cluster together elegantly at lower zoom levels. Get started on your own today with Mapbox.js and our growing plugins repository.
Mapbox Enterprise provides high volume plans for massive traffic, big storage, and dedicated support. Basically it’s everything we do at Mapbox already, just tailored to your custom enterprise needs.
One of the most exciting things about the Code for America fellowship has been the ability to flex our skills and share the things we love. This past Monday, my fellow fellow Livien and I had the privilege of speaking with a group of Girl Scouts here in Lexington about technology, maps, and design. Our list of possible activities was long, but we decided the best way to get a group of fourth- and fifth-graders engaged would be to get them actually making maps. The creativity was inspiring! It was so exciting to see the scouts making choices about what information to display and what colors to use on their maps – the same choices professionals are making every day.
Considering the push right now to increase the number of geoladies in the tech scene, it was thrilling to push a younger generation of girls into learning about maps and geospatial data. Spatial is special! Hooray maps!
I’m a big fan of science fiction and computer games, so I couldn’t resist making a space themed map this month. I crammed it full of bright lights and chrome like some of my favorite post-apocalyptic worlds: the Matrix, Battlestar Galactica, and Starcraft.
The State of the Map US schedule is out, and our team has some sweet sessions:
Tom presenting at last year’s State of the Map US in San Francisco.
Developer Camille Teicheira joins the Mapbox team in San Francisco! Camille is a recent graduate of Hackbright Academy, an expert in photoplethysmography, and an organizer and teacher at Maptime SF meetups. She’ll be jumping in on both building new Mapbox products and ensuring that the ones you love are faster and more stable than ever.
We’ve been looking into the impact that weather has on travel times using historical data from TrafficCast, specifically winter storms, like the one that hit the Atlanta area last month.
The day started off smoothly, with only a few commute-hour hiccups. By the middle of the day, many roads, particularly to the northwest of the city, had ground to a halt. The dots are reports of collisions or other traffic incidents, and a line that is twice as thick as the others means a road that takes twice as long to travel along as it normally does under good conditions.
Today at Mobile World Congress we showed off Mapbox support for Ubuntu Mobile with direct Mapbox.js integration into any HTML5 Ubuntu Mobile app. Developers can design totally custom maps and integrate them into their apps in minutes and even get access to native features like the camera and the accelerometer using Cordova (previously known as PhoneGap). Across all web, mobile and desktop experiences on Ubuntu an app will look exactly the same. If you have ever added a Mapbox map to a website, you’re ready to start developing for Ubuntu Mobile using HTML5.
Eric routing us to the Sagrada Familia from MWC
We are supporting Telefonica’s Wayra initiative, offering up free access to Mapbox APIs to Wayra’s next wave of tech accelerator startups. If you are a Wayra backed start-up or applying to be one come find us and let’s talk about maps and location for mobile. Be on the lookout for @ericg, @brunosan, @bobws and myself at Wayra’s 4 Years from Now event at Fira Montejuïc Hall M8 February during Mobile World Congress.
If you can’t make it to the Wayra event, meet us at our Mapping + Jamón party we’re co-hosting with Factual and CartoDB. We’re excited to talk about maps and mobile.
