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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.

Come out to GeoDC tomorrow (Wednesday, March 5th), at Stetson’s. Beers at 7:00 pm, presentations kick off at 7:30 pm.

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.

Link to the fullscreen map

The State of the Map US schedule is out, and our team has some sweet sessions:

• Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap – Baptiste Tripard from Sensefly and Bobby Sudekum will present on how imagery from UAVs open up new mapping possibilities for OpenStreetMap. See Bobby’s post on “Drone Imagery for OpenStreetMap” for a preview.
• More Open – Why It’s Time To Drop Share-Alike – Alex Barth will speak on making OpenStreetMap more open, specifically how the data and community would benefit from a liberal license and the need to remove all limitations of using OpenStreetMap as raw data.
• Implementing Change in OpenStreetMap – John Firebaugh will talk on iterative work in an open community, drawing from his work on the new editor for OpenStreetMap and a new OpenStreetMap.org design.
• Designing OpenStreetMap – Nicki Dlugash will present on how to design crazy maps with OSM, specifically sharing design techniques used by foursquare, Mozilla and the Financial Times – all based on OpenStreetMap data.
• Processing OpenStreetMap Into Vector Tiles – Dane Springmeyer will show our latest progress with vector tiles unlocking exciting features like seamlessly combining OpenStreetMap data with vectorized terrain data.

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.

Sign up to get an invite to our Mobile World Congress party – lots of talk about maps on mobile! Uncorking starts at 6pm on Tuesday the 25th of February at the Spanish Pavilion in Congress Square.

The next OpenStreetMap conference is coming to Washington, DC April 12 & 13, and you have through tomorrow — Saturday — to register at the early bird rate of just $75.

The conference is a great opportunity to learn more about OpenStreetMap and how it’s being used, meet other mappers and OpenStreetMap data users, and get involved in the largest open source mapping community creating a continuously updated representation of the world.

Register by Saturday, February 15 to save your spot and get the early bird rate.

Traveling astronaut by Tatiana Van Campenhout

OpenStreetMap has been in the news this month for its great coverage in and around the Olympic venues, particularly in comparison with Google Maps. Wired has a good piece on the subject, and Ilya Zverev of the Russian OSM community reminds us that the great data is no last minute rush job – most of the area has been well mapped for years.

But OSM doesn’t just win where it has more detail – it wins everywhere by being open. Whether you want to contribute to the map of your neighborhood, or dive in deep and learn how every piece works, or just take the data and make something new and awesome, you can do that. Being open is pretty cool.

View fullscreen map.

GitHub just added the ability to show changes to their awesome integrated maps. This makes collaborating on open geodata even better: you can see the full history of GeoJSON files as they’re edited. And under the hood is open source software like Mapbox.js and the simplestyle-spec open standard.

Also, check out the piece in the Atlantic “Github’s New Feature Means Big Things for Open Data”