We’re truly excited to introduce you to some of the new faces at CartoDB.

Please, let’s welcome:

Jeret Jenkins

Before arriving at CartoDB, Jeret ran recruitment at an ad-tech startup and at the American Civil Liberties Union. He’s a natural ambassador who loves connecting new people with jobs they will love, and we are excited to have him as our Senior Talent Manager!

“I was really attracted to CartoDB’s values and how the leadership takes those values seriously. We have great potential, cool tech and good people. I love being a part of that hyper-growth stage,” says Jeret. “It’s fun to see our vision resonate with new people.”

Jeret loves old maps (he has a copy of an 1673 Dutch map of New Amsterdam hanging in his apartment), riding his bike through Central Park while trying to avoid injuring tourists, and skiing and summer hiking in CO. He’s been a drummer as long as he’s been able to hold a drumstick, and when you’re in NYC, ask him to show you his favorite galleries at the Met.

Tracee Hurley

Tracee is the ideal person to manage our Partner Program for North America. Her experience leading the Geospatial Practice at systems integrator Cloud Sherpas means she’s seen every geo-IT architecture under the sun. Both at CloudSherpas and at AirWatch (VMWare) before that, Tracee has played a major role in ensuring demanding enterprise clients are happy and secure. She wears her Type A badge with honor (and a smile) and loves getting big things done.

“The traditional GIS partner ecosystem is full of organizations who are looking to innovate with new technologies and the CartoDB platform is valuable in so many scenarios,” she explains. “Both as a powerful ‘glue’ and an analytics platform.”

Tracee can’t sit still. She’s a gym enthusiast who loves to travel (Railay Beach in Thailand is her favorite place in the world), her awesome young son Kevin keeps her on her toes, and on the side she’s writing a cookbook!

Tyler Bird

Tyler aims to use our Grants Program to help students, educators and nonprofits move mountains. He comes from an international development background and recently completed a UN fellowship in Asuncion, Paraguay.

At CartoDB, he is making his first map that shows all the landmine-related events that have occurred in Colombia over the past 20 years. “I think maps are a powerful way to see and ‘feel’ the scope of a problem, and to understand how it impacts communities.” he explains.

Beyond his efforts building the Grants Program as part of the CartoDB Community team, Tyler works on an array of community outreach initiatives including workshops, events, and conferences. As he puts it, “I wanted to work where data, development and community engagement meet, and CartoDB could not be a better match.”

Tyler is an avid cyclist, snowboarder, and photographer. He loves to travel, but Prospect Park is his favorite place in the NYC.

Don’t forget to check out our job section!

Welcome to the team!

Welcome to the fourth blog post of our mobile blog series! We hope you have been learning new insights on how to leverage CartoDB’s native mobile SDK for your device. Today, we’ll be discussing the most typical application of the SDK: showing data on a map and how it can be done technically.

Data when added to the map is organized in layers, a concept that should be familiar to GIS users. The usual approach is to add one TileLayer to a basemap, as suggested in our Getting Started Guide (e.g. our tiled vector map with OpenStreetMap data). Then, you add one or several interactive VectorLayers on top of that, filled with markers, texts, and pop-ups.

Technically, our map SDK has one powerful concept: each map layer must have a ‘DataSource.’ This defines the where and how the layer retrieves data. In this case we use ‘LocalVectorDataSource,’ which keeps map objects (vector data in other words) in memory, and is used for VectorLayers to create map data overlays. Note: you need to use VectorLayer and LocalVectorDataSource even for just one marker on your map.

With the Nutiteq SDK, you can add various different objects: markers, points, lines, polygons, text, balloon pop-ups, and 3D models on the map. For each object the app must define styling (colors, icon, width, size), specify coordinates, and then add it to LocalVectorDataSource. Then we create a VectorLayer with the data source and add the layer to the map.

See following table for different object type details:

Now it is time to code! For the app code samples see adding objects to the map page in our documentation portal.

Happy mobile data mapping!

CartoDB loves going new places and exploring new things. That’s why we take risks with our technology and platform, which ultimately provide new insights for you and for us! So it is not surprising that we will be heading to South Korea and Japan, as we work to expand all our markets. While we are there, please don’t hesitate to email us to arrange a meeting to discuss location intelligence and better data analysis.

CartoDB in Japan

Javier de la Torre and Jaime de Mora represent CartoDB in our first appearance ever in Japan! Collaborating with our partner, Pacific Spatial Solutions we will hold an event in Osaki, Shinagwa-ku on April 25-26 on the campuses of Rissho University and the Sagamihara campus of Aoyama Gakuin University.

Discover why CartoDB is the location intelligence solution for Japan and how you can harness the power of deep data insights with CartoDB technology. Additionally, there will be a demo on, ‘How to use CartoDB’ by Pacific
Spatial Solutions.

What’s the schedule?

• CartoDB Japan16, April 25
  
  18:00 - 18:10 The beginning of the CartoDB era in Japan by PSS’ Hiroo Imaki
  18:10 - 18:20 Open source trends and cloud services for businesses by Toru Mori
  18:20 - 18:45 Why CartoDB in Japan? Why now? By CartoDB’s CEO, Javier
  18:45 - 19:10 CartoDB’s road map by CartoDB Sales Director, Jaime de Mora
  19:10 - 19:40 CartoDB Demonstration by PSS’ Yutaka Yasoshima
  19:40 - 20:10 End
  20:15 - until Welcome Party! (This is not a part of this event)
  

• GeoGeoWest CartoDB Night an academic event, April 26
  
  16:50 - 16:55 What is CartoDB? By Hiroo Imaki
  16:55 - 17:00 Open source software
  17:00 - 17:40 Location intelligence with CartoDB by CartoDB CEO, Javier
  17:40 - 17:50 Break
  17:50 - 18:05 CartoDB examples by CartoDB Sales Director, Jaime
  18:05 - 18:20 CartoDB Demo
  18:20 - 19:00 Small party + Q&A
  

Both events are free, so don’t forget to RSVP for CartoDB Japan16 and GeoGeoWest CartoDB Night!

CartoDB in South Korea

Then we’ll head west to Seoul, South Korea with our partner Story, Place, & Human (SPH). Where we’ll be networking and talking about the benefits of location intelligence for your business. Join us on Tuesday, May 3, 2016 to learn all about CartoDB, location intelligence, and data analytics.

• Big Data is easier, May 3
  
  14:00 - 14:30 Greetings / CartoDB Introduction
  14:30 - 15:00 CartoDB Products & References
  15:00 - 15:30 Real Demo (3)
  15:30 - 15:50 Coffee Break
  15:50 - 16:30 DIY Map Contest
  16:30 - 17:00 CartoDB Technology
  17:00 - 19:00 Networking
  

Free registration is available for the first 30 registrants, so register now!

We are really looking forward to expanding our APAC presence and really hope to see you all there, so don’t forget to set up your meeting today!

Happy data mapping!

Data velocity, variety, and volume are growing every second as more and more systems, from satellites, drones, to mobile devices, are designed for data gathering. We call this massive accumulation of data, Big Data. How we come to understand this collection of data can no longer be dependent on traditional forms of data analysis.

Through data-driven visualization, CartoDB’s big data application offers insights into your business intelligence that brings to the surface information once buried deep in spreadsheets and CSV files. Big data analysis and visualization with CartoDB is more than spatial analytics or GIS alone, it is the capability to filter and drill-down spatial data to identify and analyze trends and patterns from the big picture to the paint speck. That is the true power of location intelligence.

See how companies across a range of industries: finance, real estate, marketing, and operational logistics, among others, can make use of location intelligence and big data analytic technology to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Read our white paper that enables you to extract business value from big data:

Learn more

Gain an understanding of just how important big data analysis is for your
bottom line and learn how you can leverage your new insights into actionable decision making.

Stay on the lookout for our Big Data webinar, where we will demonstrate how to manage your massive quantities of data with CartoDB technology.

Happy big data mapping!

We’re excited to introduce our newest addition to our technical team, Denis! Denis comes from Yandex Maps, where he was the head of R&D of Maps and is an expert on Geospatial Systems.

Denis is joining us as the Head of Advanced Analytics. He brings with him all his experience with geospatial distributed systems to enable CartoDB to analyze and visualize much more complex data.

In the last few months we have been improving our platform for better and faster performance. We pushed a new geometry standard to improve rendering speed, which is now available thanks to the extraordinary Mapnik contributors work. We improved our cache system - with all new users in CartoDB running on top of Postgres 9.5, in addition to: vector rendering, automatic overview generation for big datasets, and many more small improvements in relability and performance to our infrastructure.

We also worked on some new technology to filter and render hundreds of millions of points on a map, which allowed us to jump two orders of magnitude in what CartoDB can do out of the box. Who said Postgres couldn’t handle that amount of data points?

One of our objectives in technology is to be able to analyze and render faster without any constraints to the user. That’s the real challenge - being able to render fast and at the same time remain dynamic, this is where CartoDB is most unique.

We are looking forward to adding Denis’ unique perspectives to our amazing team.

Welcome Denis!

CartoDB is happy to announce the re-launch of our robust Grants Program! The CartoDB Grants Program funds organizations seeking the means to create meaningful data-driven visualizations that facilitate efforts to achieve social progress, environmental protection, technological innovation, data science, and economic growth.

If applying geospatial analysis via data-driven visualizations will benefit your cause, we want to help! Discover how your organization can benefit from CartoDB’s Grants Program.

Grants for Good: What We Fund

Receive up to $5,500 in CartoDB software to improve your project with deeper analysis and valuable insight.

Who can apply?

Non-profits working for social and political change or organizations addressing humanitarian emergencies.

Real change happens when individuals and teams are equipped with the tools and resources necessary to organize around a cause. Humanitarian efforts need to be able to research and analyze the intricacies and complexities of situations and effectively communicate them with the rest of the world. CartoDB does not want a non-profit’s monetary capacity to hold them back from achieving their full potential. That’s why we offer our infrastructure, technical support, webinars, evaluations, and consultation calls, for free, to carefully selected organizations.

Grants for organizations working to protect our planet!

CartoDB grants for environmental protection and research is looking to fund tools built to help communities, companies, and citizens adapt to the changes caused by climate change. CartoDB has roots in environmental science, and our commitment to contributing to efforts to protect our planet is unwavering. We are looking for projects building mobile or web-applications, data visualizations, and data collection tools that address topics such as flooding, drought, land conservation and preservation, sustainable agriculture, heat waves, deforestation, poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking, and more. We are looking for applications that have a clear goal, clear data to support that goal, limited funding and a clear geospatial requirement or mapping need. Whether you work in environmental education, awareness, sustainable rural development, or environmental research and innovation, we want to support you.

Grants for sustainable economic growth and innovation!

Start mapping and capitalizing on our geospatial analysis technology to make better decisions, help grow your business, and stimulate the global economy through innovation and technology! CartoDB brings design and interaction to the forefront of every project because online communication starts with the very first look. We want to give free resources to thought leading companies around the world. If you are working at an early stage startup, or you are a trail blazing, innovative company that could benefit from beautiful maps or an amazing geospatial backend, let’s talk!

Grants for open data explorers!

Explore the infinite potential and new dimensions of open data, and map it!

In the name of supporting the development of open-source solutions and promoting the use of statistical data, CartoDB is offering grants to organizations and companies who are dedicated to the creation and use of open source data to create a more informed citizenry and to address the issues most important to communities. We value the work that is being done to improving data and metadata accessibility and overall quality in support of research, policy making, and transparency, in the fields of economics, finance, healthcare, education, labor, social science, technology, agriculture, development, and the environment.

We are looking to fund all those who are dedicated to discovering new data and new ways to share already existing data, increasing public access to data, finding new forms of creating and sharing open data sets, collaborating with other open data movements and efforts around the world.

Interested in applying?

Check out some important information, additional support, and valuable resources:

Qualified organizations and companies include those with limited funding and capacity, and are unable to pay the discounted price of a CartoDB account for nonprofits. We don’t want limited monetary capacity to deter good maps from being made by dedicated organizations. However, medium to large sized NGOs, as well as established startups do not qualify for our Grants program.

Additionally, an essential component of our grants package is CartoDB’s guaranteed institutional and technical support, which ensures that organizations produce successful data visualization projects that serve as compelling communication tools and facilitate deeper, more meaningful analysis.

If you are you new to CartoDB or not the most tech-savvy mapper in the world, don’t worry! We offer bi-monthly webinars offered specifically for Grantees. We want your project to be as successful as possible and we are happy to provide technical support to troubleshoot any problems you may run into. CartoDB also has a ton of helpful documentation and learning modules on our Map Academy. Please check these out first and get up to speed on the must-know features, tools, and skills needed to build a successful, powerful and beautiful CartoDB map! To get your creative juices flowing, take a look at some of the amazing maps being made with CartoDB in our Gallery.

Start your analysis project today, apply and happy data mapping!

We’re back, with our fifth mobile series post, and today we’ll be explaining offline routing for our Maps SDK.

The Maps SDK by CartoDB includes a routing API that enables users to find the fastest path between any number of points, and get route and turn instructions. The routing API works on and offline with the same API for all platforms: iOS, Android, and Xamarin.

Online routing is fairly simple from a developer point of view—the app identifies a number of location coordinates, defines ‘Online routing’ as routing method, selects routing profile and after some milliseconds and one request to our server, you get the route path and instructions. Note: we only support one profile right now: ‘nutiteq.osm.car’ - the fastest route by car using OpenStreetMap data. You can show the route as a line on the map, and instructions as a list, or as popups on the map.

Offline routing is a bit more complex since the app needs to pre-download the map package. Our offline routing data packages are prepared by country, and the code to download them is quite similar to our map packages. Simply select routing:nutiteq.osm.car as data source and the package ID-s have “-routing” as the suffix. For example, for New York, you have to download the “US-NY-routing” data package, which is a 117MB download. For comparison, the map package is 195 MB when downloaded.

For code samples see OfflineRoutingController.mm for our iOS samples, OfflineRoutingActivity.java for Android samples and OfflineRouting.cs for Xamarin/Android samples. The developer guide is also available at https://developer.nutiteq.com/guides/routing. Just make sure you use the latest SDK 3.3.0 snapshot version (as included in sample projects).

Happy mobile mapping and routing!

Mapping and data analysis are shaping the ways in which news and important stories are shared and understood. A quick browse of our journalism and new media gallery truly places into perspective the emerging practice of data-driven journalism. At the core of data-journalism, we at CartoDB are building a culture of geo-journalism underscored by our wonderful and active journalism community. Simultaneously, we strive to be at the cutting edge of data-journalism innovation with mapping and storytelling tools that take reporting to the next level, robust free accounts for IRE members, and engagement opportunities such as our Ambassador’s Program to help our journalism community get the most from their data. In short, we love data-journalists, we love our communities of storytelling mappers, and we’re celebrating our news-centric love with the Second Annual GeoJourNews Conference! - and you’re invited!

With the success of last year’s inaugural event, we’re building momentum for what’s sure to be the best GeoJourNews to date. GeoJourNews 2016 (a pun on geo-journos) is a one day conference about everything geo-news and news data with insightful and informative talks from some of the most prolific and creative mapmakers, data scientists, journalists, and activists in our community. Co-sponsored by Knight-Mozilla Open News and co-hosted at the Eugene Lang College: The New School, GeoJourNews will bring the latest and greatest geospatial and data related innovations, techniques, tools, practices, and stories under one roof. Our featured speakers are coders, journalists, cartographers, and educators from newsrooms and institutions around the world. Be sure to check the GeoJourNews website frequently as we update our speaker list! Have an idea for a great talk or some interesting insights? Our call for proposals is open now through mid-May!

Jam-Packed Schedule

Located at the Eugene Lang College, The New School, GeoJourNews will be centrally located and accessible from all over new York City. Following the conference, join us at the CartoDB office for the afterparty and lightning talks from journalisms across all landscapes.

Where: Eugene Lang College, The New School: 65 W 11th St, New York, NY

When: June 8th, 9:00 AM - 9:00 PM

Sponsors: Parson’s Journalism + Design Program, Knight Mozilla Open News

Details + Discounts!

Interested in attending, giving a lightning talk, or scoring a student scholarship to fund your attendance? Check out the conference site for more information on all of the above.

If you’re a member of IRE or a NICAR attendee, use promo code newsmaps16 for a 95% discount!

Best of all, the first 15 people who get to the end of this blog post have earned themselves a 95% discount as well!

RSVP:https://nvite.com/GeoJourNews2016/fb60/

Code:newsies2016

If you’d like to tweet about the event, or the sweet speaker set list, please use the #geojournews16 hashtag and @cartoDB!

Hope to see you on June 8th, and as always…

Happy Data Mapping!

We are very excited to share details on our upcoming trip to Tokyo, organized together with OSGeo Japan and Pacific Spatial Solutions. Javier de la Torre and Jaime de Mora will be there for a week full of events and meetings.

Our mission is to engage with the international CartoDB community and new potential cities and organizations that want to work with location data. If you would like to talk to use and learn about CartoDB and location intelligence, ping us to find a time to meet or join us at any of the events we are organizing.

We are very glad to have partnered with OSGeo Japan who has been working on popularizing open source projects in the geospatial industry. Together with Pacific Spatial Solution, we have organized two events: one focusing on business and another that is more academic. Here are some more details:

CartoDB is coming to Japan!

• Date and time：2016/4/25 - 18:00
  
• Place: Rissho University at Osaki Campus
  
• Agenda:
  18:00 - 18:05　Greetings!
  18:05 - 18:10 The beginning of the CartoDB era in Japan by PSS’ Hiroo Imaki
  18:10 - 18:20 Open source trends and cloud services for businesses by Toru Mori
  18:20 - 18:45 Why CartoDB in Japan? Why now? By CartoDB’s CEO, Javier
  18:45 - 19:10 CartoDB’s road map by CartoDB Sales Director, Jaime de Mora
  19:10 - 19:40 CartoDB Demonstration by PSS’ Yutaka Yasoshima
  19:40 - 20:10 Business Card Exchange and Discussion
  20:15 - until Welcome Party! (This is not a part of this event)
  

Sign up!

GeoGeoWest: A research and educators CartoDB Night

• Date and time：2016/4/26 - 16:00
  
• Place: Aoyama University at Sagamihara
  
• Agenda:
  16:50 - 16:55 What is CartoDB? By Hiroo Imaki
  16:55 - 17:00 Open source software
  17:00 - 17:40 Location intelligence with CartoDB by CartoDB CEO, Javier
  17:40 - 17:50 Break
  17:50 - 18:05 CartoDB examples by CartoDB Sales Director, Jaime
  18:05 - 18:20 CartoDB Demo
  18:20 - 19:00 Small party + Networking
  

Sign up!

We’ll be announcing plenty of exciting news, relevant to Japan and its community, during this week. Stay tuned and hope to see you in Japan!

日本ですぐにあなたを参照してください

Every Sales Manager and CMO needs to understand how their marketing campaigns influence the bottom-line. Unfortunately, tracking the impact of a campaign is often easier said than done.

Birdseye, a seamless connector between Salesforce and CartoDB, aims to help. Birdseye adds geographic context to your Salesforce data for a deeper understanding of what’s working and what isn’t.

Salesforce is an incredible tool for managing the sales process from lead to close, but understanding what activities impact the funnel can be more elusive.

“We kept hearing requests to help assess the effectiveness of sales outreach and marketing campaigns,” explains Patrick Yurgosky of Birdseye. “Birdseye allows us to easily bring that knowledge to Salesforce users by leveraging the incredible analytical capabilities of CartoDB.”

Understand Where and Why

CartoDB brings your Salesforce data to life:

• Flip through summaries of your data across many types of regions: census tract, zip code, county, state, arbitrary polygons, or within a specific drive-time
• Understand your customer with overlays and analysis of normalized demographic data
• Understand how your competition impacts your business
• Help your team optimize their routes and outreach plans

How Birdseye Works

Birdseye makes it easy to use the Salesforce data as a CartoDB table.

You can choose any Salesforce Object to visualize -standard or custom- and Birdseye respects your Salesforce security settings.

Birdseye creates a URL to your Salesforce data, allowing for easy and secure transfer to CartoDB. Add the URL to CartoDB as a data source, and Birdseye extracts the data in chunks, re-assembles it, and then pushes it to CartoDB. No data is stored on Birdseye’s servers and you can select different sync schedules for different Salesforce objects. Setup takes about 7 minutes.

Your tables are named and tracked according to the dataset and the time of import. And with our One-Click Mapping functionality, CartoDB will create recommended data visualizations for you to collapse the time from import
to insight.

Context, Context, Context

We’re excited about Birdseye because it offers straightforward answers to so many ‘where’ questions. Before Birdseye, location-based Salesforce Apps were mostly limited to routing sales travel. By making it easy to see layers of Salesforce and other data on the same map, Birdseye lives up to its name.

“When you can see your sales clusters overlaid on top of other, related, information, you can learn a lot about what’s driving success at your organization,” explains Yurgosky. “By bringing together so much data and presenting it in a compelling way, it makes it easy to learn who you’re reaching, who you’re missing, and where to focus your resources.”

Birdseye is available now for $50/month per Salesforce user. To learn more, contact us today.

Happy data mapping!

Last year the Ambassadors Program started as an experiment, with select CartoDB users receiving slight upgrades to their accounts. Since then, we have been watching our program grow and find ourselves constantly amazed at the level of talent and passion of our Ambassadors. We like to think that the upgraded Ambassadors accounts (more storage, more layers, sync tables, etc.) have played a part in this. ;)

Because we love what we’ve seen thus far, we are now expanding the Ambassadors Program!

More community support

Beyond offering supercharged accounts, to fuel great mapping projects, we want to help our Ambassadors stay in the center of the community (both locally and globally). In practice, we will support your presence as an Ambassador at workshops, meetups, and conferences. We will help you attend and initiate events in your local communities and beyond. So go to that conference you missed last year, talk about your projects, we’ll support you! Our support also includes exposure on our social networks, blog, and events.

We believe this is a great career boost and an amazing opportunity to showcase your work. This will not only help you become a key player in the CartoDB community, but also in the GIS, data journalism, and open data communities at large.

Better Ambassador accounts

We’ll also be progressively adding more features to the Ambassadors accounts. For instance, we just added Isolines to new Ambassadors accounts (50 free isolines/month)!

And, on a case-by-case basis, a feature may also be added to an account if a project requires it.

All of the benefits of the program are recapped in the new Ambassadors page.

Here’s the deal

What do we ask for in return? Just do amazing maps with CartoDB and share them with the world! The new Ambassador program also requires a bit more commitment than in the past – membership will be reviewed on a periodic basis, and will take into account community involvement and current projects.

Furthermore, the application process got a bit more comprehensive as we are asking candidates to present themselves and their work in short video clips. We have selected our first four Ambassadors for the quality of their work and their impact on the community.

“CartoDB and me”

Lauren Gwayne, research linguist (SOAS, University of London)

More at laurengawne.com, and @superlinguo.

Rebecca Lavoie, digital director (New Hampshire Public Radio)

More at @reblavoie.

James Leon-Dufour, architect (UNHCR)

More at @jamesleondufour.

Ricardo Saavedra, founder and CEO of Vizonomy

More at vizonomy.com, and @vizonomy.

We are very proud to have Lauren, Rebecca, James, and Ricardo as our new Ambassadors, truly making them community partners and collaborators. In the following weeks we’ll be presenting more Ambassadors, with very different stories to tell and experiences to share. Stay tuned!

Up to you!

Do you want to become a part of our Ambassadors Program? Apply to be an Ambassador now!

The Ambassadors Program is built for the community, and also by the community: please share with us any feedback you have at community@cartodb.com!

Happy data mapping!

This week the Chinese service Didi Kuaidi, launched the beta of its service in the United States. Chinese passengers who use Didi Kuaidi at home can now request rides in the U.S., and the SDK powering that app is CartoDB Mobile SDK. You can readmoreaboutthis all around the web.

We are very thrilled to see the Mobile SDK we recently announced being used in such a large application for such a disruptive service. The map is a fundamental part of the User Experience on the application, and that is important for a company completing over 10 million rides daily!

The Mobile SDK is powered by fresh vector maps coming from our Location Data Services. They are rendered on device and provide capabilities to change the style on demand, for example to reflect day and night.

Our Mobile SDK offers great flexibility when it comes to map development with offline capabilities. Together with our flexible terms and additional location services, they provide a great foundation for modern transportation companies.

Check out our Mobile SDK page to learn more about how to use it.

Welcome to the next post on mobile development at CartoDB. We have great news today. CartoDB is a proud sponsor of Xamarin Evolve— the largest gathering of Xamarin developers and others around the ecosystem! Xamarin Evolve will take place in Orlando, FL from April 24-28. We’d love you to join us at the CartoDB booth (#118)! If you are attending, contact us to meet me and some of my colleagues from CartoDB in person!

But what is Xamarin? Over 10 years ago Microsoft did a really innovative thing to overcome the problem of so many programming languages. They created a unified software framework called .NET Framework. The .NET Framework allows programs written in different languages to run in a single environment, and speak with each other.

Initially it was a Windows-only language (just like everything Microsoft did back then), but in recent years Microsoft has changed a lot. They have moved to a multi-platform phase. And guess where multiple languages and platforms are still a huge everyday issue? Yes, mobile app development.

You can write native iOS apps using Objective-C (or Swift if you feel hippy) and Android apps in Java, and there is no good way to make them talk to each other. Now this is where Xamarin comes into the picture. Xamarin is an open source based variation of the .NET Framework for iOS and Android devices.

It is not only a cross-platform mobile development tool but performance-wise it is clearly one of the best. Xamarin is 10 times faster compared to any JS/HTML5-based solution. Development time is also fast. Enterprise .NET developers, who know how to write good code in C# (the main language of .NET), can reuse their knowledge and code to create new mobile apps much faster than by re-learning completely new languages.

Xamarin was recently acquired by Microsoft and soon after they announced massive changes in their product. An exclusive and expensive developer tool was free and open source for most cases, and this makes their solution even more attractive.

Nutiteq (now part of CartoDB) has provided a map component for Xamarin developers since 2012, initially for Android, and now for more than a year also for iOS and Windows Phone apps. You can get it from here.

This provides 100% of the same features as we have for direct Android and iOS APIs: fast performance vector rendering, offline and online maps, customization of interfaces, and big datasets on maps. What’s even better? Our API is exactly the same for both platforms, so you can write your code once, and run it everywhere. In our developer guides you can find 3 samples: separate
Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, and a single one for C# for Xamarin.

Get started with Xamarin Nutiteq maps development!

See you at Xamarin Evolve and happy mobile mapping!

Have you ever shared a location in WhatsApp? That list of close-by places comes from a geocoding service. When you request a car service, like Didi, the route that the drivers take comes from a routing service. Have you ordered a pizza in Seamless? The maps that show you where the restaurant is located is a basemap service. We call all those services Location Data Services and you are using them all the time.

For quite some time, price and terms have been an enormous barrier to using these important services. The cost puts these services out of reach for organizations and individuals that wanted to perform data analysis and extract location intelligence or even consider it. Imagine if you had to pay every time you wanted to access the GPS on your phone, there would not be so many apps making use of your location. We believe a level of accessibility needs to happen for these Location Data Services to realize all their potential.

We are firm believers that Open Data and Open Source will enable this change in the industry, and fortunately we are not alone in this belief. Mapzen, an Open Source mapping company, has been working hard over the last few years on a complete set of Open Source tools and a data processing engine to make this a reality. It is in their DNA.

Partnering with Mapzen

We are excited to partner with Mapzen to continue our efforts in liberating Location Data Services! A few months ago we started working together, collaborating on technology and aligning our strategies. We discussed what it takes to provide great Location Data Services, and today we are happy to announce a partnership with them!

Randy Meech, Mapzen CEO, has decided to learn Spanish, and is starting today with an enterprise quote.

CartoDB es bueno, ellos querer valor anadido encima de Location Data, y eso es buena idea! — Randy Meech

Get translation

Under this partnership, CartoDB is commercializing Location Data Services built collaboratively with Mapzen.

Custom Basemaps
Customized raster and vector maps supported with worldwide coverage

Geocoding
Multiple geocoding and permanent storage options

Routing
Worldwide turn-by-turn directions for driving, biking, and walking - isolines included

Use inside CartoDB or as a stand-alone service that you can OEM and integrate into your application. Check out for example this visualization of tweets over time making use of CartoDB Torque capabilities and Vector Basemaps with Tangram.

Developer friendly, Enterprise ready

Mapzen and CartoDB both offer a very generous free tier for those users that want to try or use the service out of the box.

And for those organizations that require commercial services, we think we have a pretty sweet package:

• Custom limits and quotas for basemaps, geocoding, and routing

• Service level agreements available

• Professional services for custom requirements and implementations

• Use it in private or paywall apps on mobile, web and, desktop

The Mapzen and CartoDB Location Data Services are only going to get better over time as we continue to integrate our product offerings. In the meantime we’re open for business and are already working with clients to provide these services.

At CartoDB we believe the future of this industry will be created by friendly collaboration between companies, and this partnership with Mapzen is the first “next generation” alliance we will see in this space, and we think this is GOOD.

Check out our new Location Data Services page to learn more about these services and drop us a note if you want to discuss them.

Every day large volumes of location data are generated by social networks, remote sensing, and mobile devices. For quite some time, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been used as the standard tool to manage and analyze this type of geo-referenced data. However, GIS tools have always been oriented towards professionals in geomatics than to the general public, creating a barrier to real insights and data analysis.

It wasn’t until recently that a technology, accessible to all, to analyze, filter, and drill-down hundreds of millions of data points, came along to change the way organizations and individuals derived insights from location-based data. CartoDB’s Deep Insights is a comprehensive all-in-one solution for analysis that interacts with location data to extract information, which lead companies and organizations to optimize their decision making process. With this technology, organizations and individuals can explore data in real time through a customizable dashboard equipped with widgets for intelligent analysis.

GKudos, a geospatial web solutions company, is our first partner to use our dashboard. Now, GKudos can reach a new level of analysis and visualization of real estate and business data like never before.

Thanks to this analysis that Deep Insights provides, it is possible to determine patterns, visually, regarding aspects such as areas with higher activity for sale, rental properties, trends by year, type of property, and characteristics of
the property.

To show the potential and how powerful Deep Insights is, we have created
an application that allows the interactive analysis of real estate information throughout Colombia, especially in big cities like Bogota, Medellín, and
Cali. — Juan Carlos, CTO at GKudos.

It is no surprise that location information is becoming an important factor in decision making used by influential people in all organizations across all industries. It is becoming more and more evident that to really exploit the potential of location data, as a whole, a new concept is needed that can go beyond the traditional elements offered by classic GIS tools.

One of the key differentiators to Deep Insights is its ability, as an inclusive platform, to harness the power of location intelligence - moving away from
classic and standard operations to a next generation technology for analysis.
Location intelligence’s goal is to facilitate the identification and analysis of relationships of business information, regarding place and time, and emphasize new ways that people outside the world of geomatics can access that information.

To fully understand how location intelligence can benefit your organization read our white paper and start harnessing the power of your location data to derive impactfaul, meaningful, deeper insights.

Happy data mapping!

Disaster requires quick action!

Maps are an incredibly powerful tool for humanitarian crisis response. One of the most compelling phenomena in recent times has emerged from global communi ties committed to solving some of the many challenges that arise from timely humanitarian response. Ground-breaking initiatives such as OpenStreetMap have reframed the ways in which we collectively generate spatial data. Even more importantly, organizations such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team are taking this culture of mapping to new heights by activating global communities to create previously impossible amounts of data for use in crisis and humanitarian response efforts.

Last week, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Maptime NYC, and CartoDB teamed up for a very special evening of mapping. The session was in response to a powerful earthquake which struck the coast of Ecuador on Sunday. Through mapping, the session aimed to provide international and local NGOs and individuals with maps and geographic data to better respond to crises. Tyler Radford, executive director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team was special guest with a talk about the importance of crowd sourced mapping for crisis.

CartoDB’s Continued Commitment

Events of this type, and organizations such as the Humanitarian OpenSteetMap Team, have truly shaped the lives of countless people in need - especially in regions where infrastructure, road, and building data is not generally available. Here at CartoDB we feel that mapping and open data are the new frontier of rapid response.

Earlier this month we launched our Grants for Good initiative. Our new, more robust grants program is intended to fortify our commitment and dedication to efforts such as Humanitarian OpenSteetMap and the organizations that dedicate themselves to improving the lives of people and the environment across the world. In the face of crisis and environmental disaster, the tools and resources to allow for deep, meaningful action are critical, and we’re 100% committed to making CartoDB accessible and free for any community or organization in need. During these critical times in support of the Ecuador earthquakes - and for all timely humanitarian relief efforts, we’ll be expediting grants to make sure the organizations at the forefront of real response and change have our full support. In addition, if you’re an individual or project group working in these spaces, reach out community@cartodb.com and we’ll make sure you have the hook up on resources.

Use ALL the Support!

If you missed last week’s Maptime NYC, it’s not too late to get mapping with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. You can sign up for a free account here, and learn to map from your living room here.

Our friends at Digital Globe have also joined the effort and are releasing before and after imagery of the areas impacted, as well as crowdsourced data layers identifying damaged buildings, impassable roads and other sites of major destruction under a CC0 license.

Finally, an incredible way to show your support for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is to attend their benefit concert Sunday May 1st titled Coming Home: A memorial for the vicitims in Japan and Ecuador to support their disaster mapping work, including response to Ecuador and Japan. Go get your concert on for a great cause!

Happy Data Mapping!

On April 13, Kobe Bryant played his last game of his 20-year career and, in great form, scored 60 points! Fans from Los Angeles, and the world over, were saddened to see the Black Mamba go, but his shooting record will live on in history, and now as a visualization. The L.A. Timesmapped all of Kobe’s career shots using CartoDB and Python. The NBA data-driven visualization, charts every shot ever taken by Kobe - roughly 30,699 (data) points. How many points did he score in his lifetime? For those of you keeping count: 33,643 points.

So how exactly did the latimes.com do it?

Well first, to process that many data points they needed to use Python. Second, CartoDB’s technology allowed the latimes.com to take the individual data points and quickly render them into square image tiles with an invisible interaction layer. Our Editor allowed the latimes.com to style the map in purple and gold for shots made and shots missed. They used SQL to query information from the NBA database, which allowed them to choose which points they wanted to show on the map.

The sql line in the code tells CartoDB to return all the shots and sort them by a column called “priority,” which we used to keep certain points on top for interactions. Then it sorts by “event_type,” which is the NBA’s name for the column that denotes a made shot or a missed shot.

Infographics appear when you hover over a point to show you what kind of shot, when it was made, against who, and how many feet away from the key.

We sat down with the latimes.com and this is what they told us:

Why did you choose CartoDB over other data visualization services?
CartoDB was perfect for this project even though it didn’t seem like a natural fit. We had a set of data that’s not geographic, but it is spatial, so we were able to translate it onto a map. If we hadn’t used CartoDB, we probably would have used something like d3.js, but with the number of shots we were visualizing, we didn’t want to put that kind of strain on readers’ browsers (especially on mobile). So having CartoDB handle that for us by spitting out tiles was perfect.

Why did you choose to visualize Kobe’s shots?
Kobe has been a huge figure in LA for 20 years — he was a superstar almost from the moment he was drafted out of high school. So it was really important for us to have great coverage of his retirement. For the graphics team, that meant finding ways to show what a monumental figure he really was here, and his 30,000 shots are a pretty dramatic way to illustrate that.

Did you see a spike in web traffic due to the visualization?
We did — it’s drawn 1.5 million page views and 1.3 million unique visitors in the week since it launched.

Has the map had an impact on latimes.com? What kind of impact?
The day the project launched, it was by far the most viewed page on the site.

What was a favorite benefit of using CartoDB?
My favorite thing about using CartoDB on this project was being able to send SQL queries and get tiles back on the fly. Letting users filter the data was really a cool thing about this project.

Who do you think will win the NBA championships?
I think if Steph Curry comes back 100% from his sprained ankle, nobody’s going to beat the Warriors.

Do you have plans to visualize anything else?
We have some things in the works for the rest of the playoffs — we’ll see how far they get.

Interested in making brand impact or just timely, topical visualizations for your news and media outlet? Contact us.

Happy data mapping!

This year CartoDB will be at the Experience Fighters 2016— the 3rd annual national meeting of Experience Design and Innovation at the Gran Teatro Principe Pío, here in Madrid, from May 11th to 12th! CartoDB is partnering
with #EXF, alongside with Designit, in order to gather the best creative professionals and UX Designers with new inspiring content that goes beyond their screensavers.

Our very own Co-Founder and CPO Sergio Álvarez Leiva will be at the round table sessions covering “What is it all about? The Project of the Law for Transparency, Information Access, and Good Government,” alongside David Cabo (Civio), moderated by César Astudillo, on the second day, at 11:55 AM (CEST).

Also, Emilio García, one of our UI designers at CartoDB, will be hosting a
4-hour workshop during the event, on May 10th, from 4 to 8 PM (CEST) at the Designit rooms (C/ Mártires de Alcalá 4, 1º 28015, Madrid). He will be covering how UX designers are able to help users benefit from abig data datasets that are being generated everyday while cleaning and working the data in a way where it is clear for straightforward understanding and decision making.

You may access the workshop either with or without your event tickets, however make sure to use the special code CARTODB for a 20€ discount! The tickets are already available — get yours here!

If you want to join us or set up a meeting don’t hesitate to contact us!

Happy data mapping and see you in Madrid!

Since the launch of our new Grants for Good Program we have awarded a number of non-profit and environmental organizations with CartoDB Grants. It is with great pleasure that we introduce some of the work being done by social and environmental organizations who make use of CartoDB through the Grants for Good Program.

Introducing Aseptuck Land Trust

Aspetuck Land Trust is a non-profit membership organization whose mission is the preservation and conservation of open space, including farm and forest land, and the natural resources located thereon. Their work is done primarily in the towns of Easton, Weston, Fairfield, and Westport, Connecticut for the benefit and education of the public.

As part of our efforts to support environmental organizations, we awarded a year-long grant in support of the very important projects that help protect land in Connecticut – protect it from development and preserve it for open space to be enjoyed by the people that live there.

Aspetuck Land Trust actively manages their properties by consulting with experts from CT Department of Energy & Environmental Protection, The Nature Conservancy, and Audubon Society to ensure that the plants and animals that depend on the land are protected. This includes timing their meadow mowing to protect habitat for ground nesting birds, restoring river banks and building fish ladders to improve our native trout streams, removing invasive plants, improving trails to decrease erosion, and conducting wildlife surveys of properties.

The Aspetuck mapping project aims to communicate the need to preserve more land in area, which they consider to be “the last frontier” of undeveloped open space in the area, which is 50 miles away from NYC. Aspetuck Land Trust is working with the Wilton Land Conservation Trust to save land in this area from development. The project will connect existing trails maintained by Aspetuck and Wilton Land Trust with the Norwalk River Valley Trail which starts in Norwalk and ends in Danbury, Connecticut.

Introducing the San Francisco Bay Area based Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective documenting the dispossession of San Francisco Bay Area residents in the wake of the Tech Boom 2.0. Through digital maps, oral history work, film, murals, and community events, the project renders connections between the nodes and effects of new entanglements of global capital, real estate, high tech, and political economy. It studies the displacement of people but also of complex social worlds as certain spaces become desirable to such entanglements. Maintaining anti-racists and feminist analyses, as well as decolonial methodology, the project creates tools and disseminates data that contributes to collective resistance and movement building.

Santa Monica Ellis Act Evictions:

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project has been using CartoDB for some time now and we are happy to have them as part of our new program. The grant is allowing them to expand their project into new areas of the city, including Oakland. Check out some of their amazing work!

• Foreclosures in Alameda County
• Killings by Law Enforcement in Oakland
• Wallstreet Landlords, Oakland
• Loss of Public Space, SF

Stay tuned for more information on our Grants for Good Program and the amazing organizations who have received CartoDB grants for environmental protection, social and political change, economic growth, and increased accessibility and use of open data.

Happy Data Mapping!

This is going to sound extreme, but without open source software there would be no internet as we know it. That’s right. Everyday we utilize a technology built on collaborative software that only gets better and more powerful the more open and secure it becomes. Each year a conference celebrating the community and collaborative nature of open source tech happens and we couldn’t be more thrilled to take part.

CartoDB has been participating and sponsoring the premier conference on free and open source software for geospatial, better known as FOSS4G-NA, for several years now and this year is no exception!

FOSS4G-NA 2016 will take place in Raleigh, NC. From May 2-5, contributors, adopters, users, extenders, teachers, service providers, consumers, businesses, and research organizations will gather as a community to share their expertise and learn from each other.

This year CartoDB’s lovable team, comprised of Mamata Akella, Senior Cartographer, Stuart Lynn, Map Scientist, and Santiago Giraldo, Civic Technologist, will be in attendance and giving some very insightful and interesting talks on topics like:

• Beyond Mapping Population Density: Cartography for Big Data hosted by Mamata Akella (301B - Tuesday, May 3 - 10:30 to 11:05) — Read More

• Wrapping up Python into a cloud-based PostgreSQL hosted by Stuart Lynn
  (302C - Wednesday, May 4 - 17:40 to 17:55) — Read more

• Analyzing Large Datasets in Postgres Sponsored by CartoDB and hosted by Santiago Giraldo (301A - Wednesday, May 4 - 19:00 to 20:00) — Read more

• Machine Learning on Geospatial Datasets for Segmentation, Prediction, and Modeling hosted by Stuart (302A - Thursday, May 5 - 10:30 to 11:05) — Read More

Hope to see you in Raleigh, NC and happy data mapping!