Over the next month or so I’m speaking at some cool conferences you might want to check out:
Check out this review at the unofficial apple weblog of Roadee, a iPhone nav app which uses OSM:
Yes, all true. I’m talking about Roadee, an iPhone nav app that depends on the open sourced openstreetmap.com. That eliminates the high fees paid to license map data, and allows a nav app for under 2 bucks.
Read all about it here!
Clark Asay helps the Foundation with many issues around the license transition and couldn’t be at the State of the Map conference in Amsterdam last month for all the fun in-person discussions around it. So we thought we’d print a map and have the attendees sign it as a note of thanks. And here we are, so thanks Clark!
Check out the map above that RichardF highlighted in this post some time ago. It shows OSM data coloured by the editor software. Blue is potlatch, red is josm, green is merkaartor and grey is anything (say, JOSM or imports) since not all editors declare themselves there is an ‘everything else’ category. And of course it was built by the eponymous Matt.
Last month, when Zack Ajmal was planning a vacation to Italy, he set out to find the first thing that a traveler would need in a foreign land: a map. But digital maps of Rome and Venice for his Garmin GPS device cost almost $100. So instead, Ajmal turned to OpenStreetMap, a community-driven maps database.
“It worked out pretty well,” the Atlanta-based engineer says. “I found Open MTB, which had outdoor hiking and cycling maps with not just roads information, but also trails, short cuts and little known routes.”
Check out the MetaPlaces conference in San Jose in September. Good crowd of speakers including yours truly.
As Tyler Bell of Yahoo! is quoted on the website:
“I’m delighted to see this focus on an holistic location aware experience and business. The future of geo technologies has very much outgrown its origins in the traditional automotive sector.”
I did an interview at the excellent Fire Station Pub in London last week, you can check it out here
The brilliant part about crowd sourcing mapping data is that, unlike Wikipedia articles, there’s less of a chance of bias. There’s no opinion involved. Either a road is there or it isn’t. The only issues have been over road naming in the disputed area of Northern Cyprus and the odd bit of accidental map graffiti.
Super genius Matt Amos built this map of OSM mailing list activity:
It shows first where we have mailing lists and second the level of activity in terms of number of posts per month.
And this one shows the posts per capita measured in posts per million people.
So the clear disparities are there, but we can fix them and begin to build communities across all those grey areas.
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