As summer turns to fall, BBQ and lemonade gives way to packed lunches and cafeteria delights. But back-to-school stays cool with CartoDB’s Education Whitepaper. Ready to elevate your classroom lectures and group projects, CartoDB’s Education Whitepaper provides solutions for map-based data visualization, analysis, and storytelling - with no coding skills required.

Today’s GIS education should reflect technological changes as well as ever evolving student demands. The simplicity of cloud-hosted data-location mapping add an element of ease, while addressing the needs of casual users and those who want to take technology to the next level. CartoDB prepares educators and students for success as well as advances in technology, starting with use in the classroom and later in research and the workplace.

Discover how CartoDB’s cloud-based service is taking education to the next level and offering students, faculty, and researchers around the world the opportunity to have powerful data-driven GIS visualizations.

Learn more!

Our Education Whitepaper shows how CartoDB is a proven cloud-based, open source GIS and mapping solution for education. Enjoy the summer sun while you can and download our whitepaper for your final summer reading!

To know more about CartoDB’s Education Whitepaper sign up here and to discover more ways you and your classroom can engage with CartoDB, sign up for an account and get started today!

Happy Mapping!

Words have never looked so beautiful before. When using CartoDB turn plain text into stunning visualizations that capture the minds and eyes of your readers. More than 80 media channels use CartoDB to visualize stories all around the world. From The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times— CartoDB’s visualizations make insights easier to understand.

Using infowindows, density overlays, and animated maps, among others, CartoDB is the solution that brings your stories to life.

CartoDB in collaboration with The Telegraph has put together a 90-minute webinar geared toward journalists with beginner to intermediate map making skills. The webinar will cover various topics from map design, design theory, preparing data, and creating insightful and easy to understand text, legends, and infowindows.

Save your seat for CartoDB’s & The Telegraph’s “Techniques for Journalists to Get the Most Out of CartoDB,” a free webinar on Wednesday, August 26 at 10:30 a.m. EST.

No coding skills are required but we will be touching on advanced CartoCSS and basic HTML.

Happy Data Mapping!

I remember this one time at band camp, it seemed things were going so well. It was a wet, hot, good ol’ American summer. Possibly the only thing missing was a proper web mapping class, appropriately scheduled after friendship bracelet making class.

So in the spirit of awesome summer camps, last week we held CartoCamp Edu, a day full of discussions, presentations, and workshops in collaboration with talented educators to think through the uses of web mapping in the classroom.

The event was such a success that we thought we’d bring you a CartoCamp Meetup! Similiar to CartoCamp Edu, but more varied if focus. There will be Map Academy lessons in person, open hours for people to come in and get map help, and surprises along the way. Come in and ask questions or get help on making web maps.

Benefit from a large and active community of builders and innovators while learning new generation web mapping skills. Use the latest in geospatial technology and build a great portfolio in the process.

Join CartoCamp Today and come in on August 28 to CartoDB’s Brooklyn headquarters to have a coffee and talk maps.

Late last month, we had the pleasure of hosting an event devoted to real-time data mapping, a common request among our community of cartographers and data journalists. For every election map, crisis tracker, or geo-reporting tool, there is a strong need for resources that support consistent data updates and we’re happy to oblige with sync tables as a service in CartoDB.

This event was a kickoff to CartoCamps, a workshop series we’re launching to provide thematic bootcamps that train these common mapping concerns. Read on to learn more and sign-up for future events!

Real-Time Reporting Today

Long-time partners and avid CartoDB community members at 140Journos joined us for this inaugural event in the series, contributing their real-time data collection usecases to fuel what became a 3-hour chat about options for cool maps that empower citizen reporters. For those unfamiliar with their mission, 140Journos comprises a small outfit of developers, reporters, designers and hackers who leverage the power of social media platforms to build a network of producers, authoring what has been coined as “counter-media” by the Colombia Journalism Review. Freedom of the Press and unbiased citizen expression are tough values to defend in much of the world, and 140Journos does what it can to promote platforms for mobile reporting and beautiful interfaces to index citizen opinion throughout Turkey.

Maps Made for “Counter Media”

Some of 140Journos’ mapping projects focus on geographic representation of their submitted media, tagged to locations but anonymized to protect citizens submitting. Others tackle more thematic issues, like party-level politcal dominance for election districts:

Or this project, inspired by the Guardian-US’s Congressional representation map, that illustrates parlimentary representation in Turkey by factors like gender, party affiliation, age, and education level.

The need to provide compelling, interactive maps illustrating existing governmental representation, coupled with real-time, uncensored media commentary in Turkey, made 140Journos the perfect partners for our workshop. What followed was a discussion of what our Import API, Sync Tables, and existing usecases for weather reporting, election monitoring, traffic mapping among others can do to augment citizen-driven data journalism. From this, we were able to compile a pretty awesome workshop script for common real-time mapping solutions.

Likewise, we felt inspired to work on subsequent ideas for realtime mapping, like this proxy built by @stuartlynn to process EONet NASA data as geojson for easy sync table setup in CartoDB. Or this tutorial that Andy Eschbacher developed on real-time earthquake tracking in Nepal.

Attend a CartoCamp

Moving forward, we’ll be hosting a series of CartoCamps to tackle similar topics with exciting project partners.

Take a look at last week’s CartoCamp - Edu, where we provided materials to educators building their syllabi around mapping projects for the upcoming fall Semester. Stay tuned for CartoCamp announcements via our spiffy new meetup geared toward our communities in education, journalism, urban planning, and environmental cartography! Stop by for our next one, this Friday, August 28th in the New York CartoDB office!

Meantime, happy mapping!

You’ve surely noticed that we’ve redone some parts of the web app to support some of our new features, so that creating maps is now easier, faster, and more straightforward than ever. As part of these improvements we’ve rebuilt the way you are able to add layers to your maps.

Things like the search box, the option to look for layers that have been shared with you (if you are part of an organization with an Enterprise account), and access to the data library from the new modal windows will help you a lot when adding new layers. There is no better way to give context to your data than by combining it with extra information.

What can I find in the data library?

Our Data Library contains more than 120 datasets organized in different categories. From census or administrative data to buildings’ footprints or elevation models of some cities around the world. All these datasets are open data, and already available for you to use it in your maps with no extra cost.

We add more datasets each week so remember to check it our next time you login to your CartoDB account.

Happy data mapping!

When I saw this tweet from Jorge Arévalo I couldn’t resist.

How to Track NBA Player Movements in Python http://t.co/sZQG48oGfQ

— Jorge Arévalo (@jorgeas80) August 28, 2015

The blog post linked in Jorge’s tweet nicely explains how to process NBA statistics data in order to analyse it and generate some charts of different metrics. When I was reading the blog post, I immediately saw coordinates and time and thought that it would be cool to try visualizing it with Torque, our own temporal mapping library.

Using Jorge’s methods, I processed the data, but instead of plotting the data, I exported it to CSV. As always, uploading the CSV to CartoDB was just a quick drag-n-drop and immediately I finally had an nba_moment. Because CartoDB didn’t recognize immediately the coordinates of the players as something to map, it was a table without geometries. However, with the x_loc and y_loc fields it was just waiting a little converstion to be used on a visualization using SQL. Here is the final result:

With my new CartoDB Map, the first thing was to remove the basemap and use the same court png used at the blog post, uploading it as a custom basemap. You could do something more advanced, but for testing purposes I allowed to just repeat over the entire background.

With the court in place the next step was to generate the data for Torque. I came up with this SQL:

SELECTcartodb_id,game_clock,CASEWHENteam_id=-1THEN'The Ball'WHENteam_id=1610612746THEN'Los Angeles Clippers'ELSE'Houston Rockets'ENDteam,-- Gate team names from ids
ST_SetSRID(ST_TransScale(ST_MakePoint(-- Create a point from
x_loc,-- same x from the table
50-y_loc-- but revert the Y coordinate
),0.0,0.0,-- Don't translate
1.45,1.45-- and scale a bit to adapt to the court
),3257-- Fake a Web Mercator
)ASthe_geom_webmercatorFROMnba_moment

Torque usually works well with dates and I could actually have had exact timestamps but for this short period, but for a quick prototype the game_clock field worked just as well. For the categories I used a CASE statement to organize the data and make it easier to produce a nice output.

With the data ready, the next step was symbology. Using the wizard I selected the Torque Cat option which allows you to apply variable colors to different categories. I defined fields to be used, colors, steps, etc. and fine tuned the settings in the CartoCSS tab to give a better aspect to the trails. I added a few elements on top of the map and a proper description for the visualization and that was it.

Following the blog post, once you have the data in a well defined structure, you can start digging into on the numbers - that’s what they were collected for after all. With that table in CartoDB, you can run all kinds of aggregations and statistics but I wanted to try one that takes into account the spatial aspect. Watching the cool visualizations produced by the NBA portal, it seems the area covered by the team members is an important metric. That’s a Convex Hull of our positions grouped by moment and team!

WITHpositionsAS(SELECTgame_clock,team_id,ST_MakePoint(x_loc,y_loc)aspositionFROMnba_momentWHEREteam_id!=-1-- we don't need the ball
)SELECTST_Area(-- get the area
ST_ConvexHull(-- of the polygon formed
ST_Collect(-- by the aggregation
position-- of the positions
)))area,game_clock,team_idFROMpositionsGROUPBYgame_clock,team_idORDERBYgame_clock,team_id

Plotting this query using web technologies is pretty straight forward, check the code of this jsfiddle and you’ll see that running the query and displaying this graph in 40 lines of code is easy as pie.

This is just an example, good sports geeks will know way better than me how to extract more knowledge from these datasets that technology applied to sports brings to us.

Happy data mapping!

At CartoDB, we love supporting the outstanding efforts of organizations having meaningful impact on society and the environment. With programs such as our ever-growing climate and non-profit grants, we are providing the tools and infrastructure to organizations that are shaping the future of our world.

Recently, we awarded a grant to Access Now, an organization dedicated to extending and defending the digital rights of people across the world by using tech-driven policy, user engagement, and direct technical support. Their extraordinary efforts have helped positively impact the lives of many world-citizens, and CartoDB is proud to provide next generation mapping technology for their continued fight! With their first CartoDB map - the global net neutrality map on the Global Net Neutrality Coalition’s homepage - going live late last month, we sat down to talk maps and activism with Access Now’s Senior Global Advocacy Manager: Deji Olukotun.

Tell us a bit about Access Now and the Global Net Neutrality Coalition.

Access Now extends and defends the digital rights of users at risk around the world. By combining tech-driven policy, user engagement, and technical support, we fight for open and secure communications for all across our six offices. Our 24-hour Digital Security Helpline– the only one of its kind – serves activists, journalists, and marginalized communities to help them work and live safely.

Over the past two years, we’ve seen tremendous gains in the fight to protect Net Neutrality and the open Internet around the world. In February 2015, the U.S. took important steps to protect Net Neutrality when the FCC announced its Open Internet Rules, ending the threat of fast lanes and slow lanes on the Internet. However, Net Neutrality is very much a global issue. From Chile to Peru, to the Netherlands and even Slovenia, numerous countries have passed laws preventing discrimination on the Internet. Net Neutrality is therefore important not just for freedom of expression and innovation – it’s important for dynamic tech companies like CartoDB.

Why did you choose to apply for a CartoDB non-profit grant?

Access is a data-driven non-profit devoted to human rights, and we maintain a variety of needs for visualizations. As an organization dedicated to defending and extending the digital rights of users at risk in the 21st century, we believe in the power of technology to bring about social change. CartoDB is a leader in geospatial visualization. Our projects – including Access Now, Red LatAm, Save The Internet, MLAT, and Stop Cyber Surveillance– provide support for partners to show that we are committed to building and protecting platforms that empower and educate. Our 24-hour Digital Security Helpline, mentioned above (we’re proud of it!), serves users at risk around the world, and we gather important data about threats to marginalized communities. In 2014 and 2015 we assisted journalists, activists, and sexual minorities in countries as far afield as Malaysia, Haiti, Vietnam, and Uganda. We also regularly publish reports about issues such as government surveillance, mobile phone tracking, cyber security, and international trade.

How has the CartoDB non-profit grant for Access Now helped achieve your goal/mission?

We recently launched the interactive Global Net Neutrality map this month, and so far we’ve heard positive responses from advocates from as far afield as Iceland and Zimbabwe. We’ve also been encouraged by the response on social media – and we’ll be incorporating user feedback to make the map more effective. The map forms an important tool in the resources available on the homepage of the Global Net Neutrality Coalition, and our aim is to make it even more powerful.

Can you talk a bit about the work you’re doing and how you hope to use the grant/map now and in the future?

We work on a variety of issues – cyber security, censorship, fighting data retention, and expanding access to the Internet – but for Net Neutrality in particular, we hope the map will serve as a resource for people interested in a free and open Internet to push for laws and rules in their own countries. That’s why we have the Model Framework on Network Neutrality on the site as well as an international definition of Net Neutrality translated into more than 15 languages. We’re deeply engaged in the fight in Europe for Net Neutrality, which is on the cusp of deciding rules that will impact all 28 member countries – including Spain, where CartoDB originated. Things look good so far, but the fight is not yet over.

What are your plans for maps moving forward?

We have too many needs! Because we’re an international organization, frequently maps are the best way for us to explain how issues cut across borders and boundaries. For example, this year we’ve seen bad cyber legislation crop up in Africa, the UK, and the United States. We’ve also seen a worrying slate of Internet shutdowns and disruptions in the South Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. Shutdowns tend to precede egregious human rights violations, and mapping them with CartoDB could prove an excellent way to make an impact.

Any further comments?

We’re grateful for the support of CartoDB. Anyone who’d like to learn more about Access, and join the fight for digital freedom, can sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter or on Facebook.

Thank you Deji and Access Now for the incredible work and continued efforts towards digital equality! We can’t wait to see what’s next for Access Now with CartoDB. Stay tuned for more updates!

If you are a non-profit or group working towards making the world a better place, don’t forget to check out our climate and non-profit grants page!

Happy Data Mapping!

CartoDB began with just a dream and soon, we’ll put miles under our wings (or elephant ears) and cross the United States to experience the power of that vision. Our CEO Javier de la Torre, along with VP of Sales Alon Vernikov and EMEA Sales Director Jaime de Mora, will be attending Dreamforce in San Francisco from September 15-18.

Innovation and new technologies are at the very core of CartoDB, so we couldn’t miss this event! This is the second consecutive year that CartoDB will be attending Dreamforce, a Salesforce conference dedicated to bringing leaders and industry pioneers together for fun, inspiration, and giving back.

We’d love to meet up with our users, partners, prospects, and anyone who wants to hear about the power CartoDB offers to transform your data into insights that, ultimately, will help you and your company to make better and faster decisions. Drop us an email if you would like to hear more.

In addition to being there, we would like to celebrate the geospatial industry and meet users from the local community. So if you’re in San Francisco on Wednesday, September 16, please join us and our Planet Labs friends at 7 p.m. for CartoDBeers at 346 9th Street. We’ll chat about maps and location data; please confirm your attendance here.

Happy data mapping!

CartoDB prides itself on helping empower organizations and people to achieve great things and make the world a better place. Our ever-growing climate and non-profit grants have provided innovative organizations with tools and infrastructure to have meaningful impact from the neighborhood all the way up to the world.

The Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History has been one of our most recent grant recipients this year. They have been working with citizens in Chapel Hill North Carolina to create meaningful conversations and impactful change for communities on a local level! The Jackson Center’s award-winning work has helped reshape the narratives of equality and urban change in North Carolina and CartoDB is proud to provide the resources to empower individuals and communities. We sat down with Hudson Vaughan to talk about what’s next for The Jackson Center with CartoDB.

“This coalition…showed us what can happen when you combine powerful narratives and undeniable data with heart and determination.”  - Joe Schwartz, The Independent Weekly, Citation for Indy Citizen Award in 2012.

Tell us a bit about the Jackson Center, your mission and previous work.

The Jackson Center was established in 2008 to respond to rapid demographic changes in the Northside, Pine Knolls and neighboring, historically African-American, low-wealth communities in Chapel Hill. Diversity in Chapel Hill has significantly decreased: the black population has fallen to 9.7% and the median home price has recently jumped to $427,000, making the town increasingly inaccessible for Chapel Hill’s low and moderate income households. Less than 40% of the University and Town workforce (and less than 15% of local service workers) live within 10-30 miles from their workplace, a sharp drop from the large percentage who were proud to call Chapel Hill home. Northside, Pine Knolls, and other neighboring African American communities have experienced a storm of transition due to predatory investment to provide student rentals in the “hot market” of downtown. In just ten years, the family population has been cut in half, and home prices and property taxes have skyrocketed as much as 400% – an increasing burden for 4th and 5th generation families hoping to stay for the long haul or families hoping to live in Chapel Hill’s most diverse neighborhoods.

The Jackson Center was formed to advance community self-determination and to preserve social and economic diversity in rapidly gentrifying African-American neighborhoods in Chapel Hill. We do this through community-first planning, creative communication strategies, history education, neighborhood leadership support, and organizing for systemic policy changes.

Our organization has eased long-standing divisions in Chapel Hill/Carrboro through innovative collaboration with multiple constituencies. We are proud of recent recognition by a regional “Indy Citizen Award” for being part of “a community movement that combines people of different generations, different backgrounds, different races and other preconceived notions of standing in society. It’s a movement about neighbors and what happens when people start truly living in community with each other.”

A few of our recent accomplishments:

Increased civic engagement through coalition-building: We organized hundreds of residents through a broad-based coalition “Sustaining Ourselves” to advocate policy changes that led to the passage of the Northside/Pine Knolls Community Plan and included a historic moratorium on development, sweeping policy changes, and over $350,000 additional annual allocations to affordable housing options, enforcement, business planning and development, and corrections to failed planning and development processes. Our coalition (SOS) was recognized with a regional Citizen Award for this effort. We also helped lead an effort to mobilized over $650,000 in affordable housing funds in Chapel Hill this year.

Mobilized community leadership: In partnership with Self-Help credit union, we developed an original model for community development and convened a Northside Compass Group, a direction setting group for all housing and neighborhood strategies composed of 18 residents from every section of the neighborhoods of change. The group has met regularly since fall of 2012 to plot housing strategies and to develop neighborhood assets, drawing on external resources and building internal networks and collective power. Trained youth leaders: For over three years, our nationally acclaimed Fusion Youth Radio program has cultivated dozens of young voices in leading public dialogue, with shows on the school-to-prison pipeline, racial identity, immigration reform, and more. It has received acclaim from PRX and provided the basis for the esteemed WUNC (NPR) youth summer institute. Preserved and shared history: We have engaged and recorded over 200 oral histories of community members; staged major exhibitions and community renewal events; and piloted our new Learning Here and Now Across Generations high-impact curricula in collaboration with area schools and community mentors, which engaged over 1100 students K-12 in its first year.

Tell us a bit about your project and how you are engaging your community.

The project we are utilizing CartoDB for is called the Northside Neighborhood Initiative (NNI). This initiative has come from years of community engagement and leadership and continues to be guided by our community compass group, which includes residents from every section of the neighborhood. One of the key components of the effort is a landbank that allows us to purchase properties in transition and have community leaders help decide the future of these properties, with a strong priority on affordable and elder housing. The central goals are: 1. Helping long-term residents who want to stay in Northside remain in their homes; 2. Attracting new residents – a balance of working families, seniors and students – from diverse backgrounds; and 3. Increasing the availability of housing and financing options for neighborhood properties.

How do you plan to use CartoDB to achieve great things in the community?

One of the ways that our organizing efforts have been successful over these years has been the utilization of community-owned data and maps.

Several years ago, we teamed up with the counter-cartographers collective to work with our coalition on a set of maps. Neighbors helped us identify and then collect data that showed the rise of investor ownership over ten years. These maps became focal points for our organizing efforts, showing the dramatic pressure that neighbors were experiencing from investors of student rental property. Combined with the stories of 4th and 5th generation families, these efforts caught the attention of the Chapel Hill Town Council and led to the beginnings of our current effort.

At the beginning of this project, we discussed trying to find a way to have easy community access to data sets and maps which neighbors help create, to provide ongoing ways to see the changes in the neighborhood, and ultimately, a way to measure the impact of this collaborative community-led effort. Our primary mapping expert and partner, Tim Stallman, identified CartoDB as the perfect platform to help our community do the many things we had hoped. We plan to utilize CartoDB to help us establish clear baseline data that will help us look at building conditions, racial and socioeconomic diversity, longevity, and a number of other factors identified by the community as significant. We then hope to utilize this amazing platform for ongoing impact, for community leadership trainings, and for use in ongoing advocacy efforts that will increase the affordability and diversity of our community.

How has partnering with CartoDB helped move the project forward?

CartoDB has already provided incredible support for this project, helping us set up the base platform which neighbors have already been excited to see. We have been collecting and updating community data with neighbors and staff members using fulcrum, which will be synced with CartoDB. From there, we will have a set of mapping layers which will provide exactly the kind of access that our neighborhood leaders need to continue to make this great effort succeed.

Thank you Hudson for the inspiring work and great successes on behalf of Chapel Hill citizens. We at CartoDB are excited to watch the Northside Neighborhood Initiative come together as a community resource and
impactful platform!

If you are a non-profit or group working towards making the world a better place, don’t forget to check out our climate and non-profit grants page!

Happy Data Mapping!

Ever wonder which kind of map to make? Lesson 1 of new Intermediate Map Design Map Academy course can help you decide!

So you’ve found your data, uploaded it to CartoDB, and see something like this:

Or you start to use the Choropleth wizard, but so far most of your polygons look too similar:

Getting your data organized and uploaded is a great start, but in both maps it’s likely too hard for users to pick out the story you’re trying to tell. What design decisions can you make now to make your map more understandable?

We hope you find this course useful! If you have feedback on it or want to suggest another lesson, please let us know at support@cartodb.com.

Seoul, South Korea, the world’s most wired and number one ranked tech ready city is hosting one of the largest global gatherings focused on open source geospatial solutions. Next week CartoDB is attending FOSS4G for the second consecutive year.

Among the unique street food vendors and awesome internet cafes you can find workshops, keynotes, and much more! Join us at table number 17 to chat about data-driven visualizations, location intelligence, and big data!

Sessions

Monday:
- Introduction to PostGIS: (Monday, Sept 14, 09:30-13:30. Room 4 -3F. Hotel) by Paul Ramsey

Tuesday:
- Building Dynamic Maps with CartoDB: (Tuesday, Sept 15, 14:30-18:30. Room 4- 3F. Hotel) by Aurelia Moser with Andy Eschbacher

Wednesday:
- Making Sense of Sensor Data with Maps: (Wednesday, Sept 16, 13:25-13:50. Room 9 - 2F, K Avenue) by Aurelia Moser.
- PostGIS Feature Frenzy: (Wednesday, Sept 16, 16:00-16:25. Grand Ballroom B - 2F, Convention) by Paul Ramsey
- Temporal Maps Leading to New Views in Spatial Analysis: (Wednesday, Sept 16, 16:50-17:15. Grand Ballroom B - 2F, Convention) by Andy Eschbacher

Thursday:
- Where do we go from here? The next 10 years of open source geospatial: (Thursday Sept 17, 18:00-18:30, Grand Ballroom B - 2F, Convention) by Paul Ramsey.
- CartoDB Basemaps: a tale of data, tiles, and dark matter sandwiches: (Friday, Sept 18, 11:00-11:25. Grand Ballroom B - 2F, Convention) by Alejandro Martínez

Friday:
- Magical PostGIS in three brief movements: (Friday, Sept 18, 13:50-14:15 Room 9 - 2F, K Avenue) by Paul Ramsey
- Taking dynamic web mapping to 1:100000 scale: (Friday, Sept 18, 13:25-13:50 Room 13 - B1F, K Avenue) by Alejandro Martínez

CartoDB’s Paul Ramsey is delivering one of the key notes, along with the President of Korea’s National Geographic Information Institute, and the Chief of the United Nations Geospatial Information Section, among others. They will be speaking on the theme of ‘Toward Diversity, FOSS4G Big Band from Seoul’.

We are happy to be a silver level sponsor of this international event, hosted for the first time ever in Asia.

Happy data mapping and see you in Seoul!

We are excited to announce the close of $23 million in Series B financing to expand CartoDB’s mission, enabling anyone to map their world’s data and leverage the power of location. The funding is led by Accel Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures as well as our earlier investors, Earlybird and Kibo Ventures. We also warmly welcome Harry Nelis from Accel as a new board member.

This moment is truly important because it sends a strong message about the location intelligence revolution as renowned investors validate our position and direction in this growing market. I would like to acknowledge the hard work done by many people in the company in the process — you guys rock!

The investment will go to strengthen all areas of the company, but will focus on these areas in particular.

• Product development— more functionalities to benefit the broader market
• Data science team— R&D will increase to build on new location intelligence analytical capabilities
• Business development— 3rd party data, and product integrations
• Marketing & Sales— to increase reach, awareness, and customers across different regions and industries

The world is producing location data faster than ever. Although data analytics have become widely available, only a few organizations and individuals can extract value from them. At CartoDB we are working on products that will make data accessible to anyone: small and large organizations, scientists, journalists, and anybody looking to extract insights and tell stories with that data.

This is a very exciting market and it is growing very quickly. It is impressive to look back and see so many different organizations and individuals using CartoDB. We have a ton of work ahead to realize the vision of location intelligence for everybody, and now we are in a better position than ever to make it happen.

Thank you to every user, client, developer, partner, and friend who has helped us get here today. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you!

Javier de la Torre,
CEO and co-founder

We are excited to announce the close of $23 million in Series B financing to expand CartoDB’s mission, enabling anyone to map their world’s data and leverage the power of location. The funding is led by Accel Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures as well as our earlier investors, Earlybird and Kibo Ventures. We also warmly welcome Harry Nelis from Accel as a new board member.

This moment is truly important because it sends a strong message about the location intelligence revolution as renowned investors validate our position and direction in this growing market. I would like to acknowledge the hard work done by many people in the company in the process — you guys rock!

The investment will go to strengthen all areas of the company, but will focus on these areas in particular.

• Product development— more functionalities to benefit the broader market
• Data science team— R&D will increase to build on new location intelligence analytical capabilities
• Business development— 3rd party data, and product integrations
• Marketing & Sales— to increase reach, awareness, and customers across different regions and industries

The world is producing location data faster than ever. Although data analytics have become widely available, only a few organizations and individuals can extract value from them. At CartoDB we are working on products that will make data accessible to anyone: small and large organizations, scientists, journalists, and anybody looking to extract insights and tell stories with that data.

This is a very exciting market and it is growing very quickly. It is impressive to look back and see so many different organizations and individuals using CartoDB. We have a ton of work ahead to realize the vision of location intelligence for everybody, and now we are in a better position than ever to make it happen.

Thank you to every user, client, developer, partner, and friend who has helped us get here today. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you!

Javier de la Torre,
CEO and co-founder

Join CartoDB, from September 15 - 17, as we immerse ourselves in the historic city of Stuttgart, Germany at the INTERGEO Conference and Trade Fair. We will spend three days engrossed in geodesy, geoinformation, land management, and cartography. INTERGEO has special space in the hearts of map scientist and offers extraordinary insights on open source GEO.

AINTERGEO has more than 16,000 visitors from 92 countries making it one of the key platforms for industry dialogue around the world. The format of INTERGEO is always evolving and develops with changes and trends in the industry. This year the conference and trade fair will be centered on new technologies, new solutions and new concepts. The event will pay homage to monitoring, mapping, software solutions, mobile computing, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, and GIS platforms - among other exciting topics.

CartoDB’s very own Eric Bean and Jorge Sanz will be there to delve into all your data-driven mapping related geospatial queries. You can find them at OSSGEO Park, at Hall 4, stand number E4.071. They’re excited to talk about the awesome world of location intelligence and how CartoDB is changing it, bit by bit.

In addition to chatting about all things geospatial related, CartoDB is dedicated to delivering PostGIS and Mapnik superpowers to all. Come hear Jorge talk about gaining the CartoDB advantage on Thursday at 10:00 AM. For more information check out the schedule here.

We look forward to seeing you in Germany! Happy Mapping!

The ‘smarter city’ is all the rage, and while a buzzing megapolis may have the complexity and resources to deploy a mayoral ‘geek squad’ or install flocks of sensors, the average town has to fulfill its duties on a much tighter budget.

We’re all about tools that bring location intelligence to everyone, which is why a new product from our partner AppGeo has us excited. They just launched the next generation of MapGeo, a data management and visualization platform for local governments. They’ve rebuilt it from scratch using CartoDB, and, if we may say so, MapGeo 2.0 is fantastic.

If you’re interested learning more about what MapGeo can offer your town or city, we hope you’ll join our October 8 webinar.

Why Location Matters to Municipalities

Cities and towns manage services and infrastructure across geographic area, so they need to track and understand what’s happening where. Location-based decisions are central to many city activities – from transportation to housing to public safety. Local authorities are also looking for ways to work smart – to do more, more efficiently, and to use data to aid their decision-making.

Kate Hickey, AppGeo’s VP for Local Government Services, explains the inspiration for MapGeo:

“After a decade of rolling out custom websites for local agencies, we had a sense of the common needs. Everybody needed base maps, query tools, access to property information and the like. We started to build a blueprint of what a hosted platform might look like in partnership with several municipalities. That blueprint became MapGeo.”

“The more users interacted with MapGeo, the more they wanted to do. They wanted the power of heatmaps and the impact of animated visualizations to explain change. City leaders wanted summary graphics to guide their work and share their reasoning with constituents. CartoDB’s mapping and analysis features make data easy to understand, and the platform is really robust, so we know we can build even more great functionality over time.”

More than a hundred municipalities are using MapGeo today. So this upgrade is based on a deep understanding of what citizens and officials do and care about. Here are some of the ways MapGeo helps address their needs.

Using Land Records to Spot Trends

Land records stewardship is crucial for determining zoning regulations, collecting taxes and managing right of ways along with dozens of other day-to-day municipal tasks. MapGeo was designed with these parcel data at its heart. An intuitive interface makes data creation, updates, and publishing fast and simple. The result is that staff and citizens have quick access to key information and broader insights.

Powered by the CartoDB APIs, MapGeo converts these tables of records into visuals showing trends and patterns. Users can see economic development indicators, such as property sales and values, construction activity, neighborhood revitalization projects, and commercial site availability, and track change over time.

A CartoDB-powered heatmap of property values helps city leaders spot clusters of economic activity.

Self-service tools for the public

MapGeo uses CartoDB’s analytical functions, via the CartoDB SQL API, to automate previously laborious and error-prone tasks.

If you’re building on a property, many towns require that you notify nearby landowners – for example, those within a certain radius – to protect against environmental and safety hazards. MapGeo allows you to simply choose your property and then query the land records for the list of nearby properties – and even create a set of mailing labels –according to the exact local regulations.

Identify abutting properties for notification and other regulations, saving a trip to the land records office.

MapGeo also makes it easy for the public to find other location-dependent information. Residents can learn when trash pickup occurs in their neighborhood. Visitors can find information about where to park. Business owners can find industrial zones to help determine where to locate a new warehouse.

Fresh information saves time

Direct access to up-to-date data, including details and related documents, can improve operations, offer new perspective, and uncover hidden opportunities.

MapGeo combines data from a jurisdiction with other public and private sources, including Google’s Street View, to help city staff save time. One simple example is property assessment. Now, when assessors and inspectors want to check the status of a development project, they can answer a lot of questions before they even arrive on site.

CartoDB powers MapGeo’s on-demand visualizations, allowing for timelapse views of everything from municipal inspection sites to home sales.

The idea is to offer each audience just what they need. For example, while staffers of the Department of Public Works might look at just a few types of data – repair requests or locations of infrastructure like hydrants – city leaders want to know how a given street or neighborhood is impacted by the full range of government services.

Various departments can look at the city’s workforce activity, showing crime incidents and responses, summarizing the number and location of inspections, detailing work order requests and how quickly they are closed.

The smarter city is within reach

Great technology is all about breaking down barriers and making hard things easy. MapGeo is a real step toward helping local governments to do just that, and we’re proud to be involved.

We’re getting closer to a day when –- whether you’re a town council member, city planner, or new resident –- you won’t need to visit multiple offices or dig through endless file cabinets to find an answer. Those of you who’ve ever worked on local policy or investment projects will understand just what a big step forward this is!

If you’re interested in MapGeo for your town, join our October 8 webinar to learn more.

Start developing with the CartoDB APIs

Learn more about MapGeo

About a month ago, we announced Insight, our first ever data and design competition in conjunction with Measure, a New York City exhibit by Storefront for Art and Architecture. With the competition close at the end of last month, we wanted to thank all of the teams who submitted projects and emphasize that we were truly blown away by the quality of maps and insight shared by our stellar community. With over 60 incredible submissions, our team spent days deeply exploring each project and deliberating in selecting the top 5 most outstanding projects to enter into our finalists round. CartoDB is proud to announce our Insight: A data and design competition finalists for 2015!

Smelly Maps

By Rossano Schifanella, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia

Humans are able to discriminate thousands of smells but city officials and urban planners deal only with the management of few bad odors. This negative and oversimplified perspective is mainly given by the fact that smell is hard to measure. The Smelly Maps project aims at disrupting this negative perspective proposing a new way of capturing the urban smellscape of a city from social media data (Flickr, Twitter). See the full project HERE.

The Building of NYC

By Tim Martin, Llana Safer Martin

NYC experienced various periods of building construction since the turn of the 20th century. Historical tax lot data shows building activity that appears to correspond with economic boom and bust cycles. From the prosperity of the 1920s, to the decay of the 1970s, the built environment seems to mimic the City’s changing social and economic landscape. This time-series visualization highlights those cycles by showing their corresponding patterns of development in Lower Manhattan from 1900 to 2014. See the full project HERE.

Waste.Exposed

By Bernardo Loureiro

Waste.Exposed explores the flows of waste and recyclables out of New York City. The website allows, through a mapping application, for users to visualize the journey of their own waste, depending on where they live. All of NYC’s waste is exported to other places, sometime as far as 500 miles away, to be then incinerated or landfilled. The project seeks to create a greater understanding and awareness of this complex waste system, highlighting its environmental impacts. See the full project HERE.

Am I Rent Stabilized

By Chris Henrick

Am I Rent Stabilized is a web application that encourages New York City tenants to find out if their landlord may be illegally overcharging them for a rent stabilized apartment and if so, motivates them to take action. The app checks a user’s address against a database of properties that are likely to have rent stabilized apartments, recommends a course of action, and informs the user of their nearest tenants rights group. The content is available in Spanish or Chinese for non-english speakers. See the full project HERE.

Airbnb Vs. Berlin

By Alsino Skowronnek, Jonas Parnow, Lucas Vogel

Rents are on the rise in Berlin, and the reasons are manifold. Online portals of the so-called “sharing economy”, such as Airbnb, are marketing to tourists and have proven to be good business. But are they contributing to a shortage in affordable housing by replacing regular rental appartments with short-term holiday flats? This question has sparked a vivid public debate not only in New York, San Francisco and London, but also in Berlin. This is a look into Airbnb’s business activity in Berlin. See the full project HERE.

Thank you again to all of the teams that submitted projects. It has been a truly incredible experience for us, and we hope to inspire more great works in the future. As our judges panel works hard to review the finalists in the following weeks, stay tuned for our winning submission announcement September 24th! If you haven’t done so already, stop by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and check out cartoDB’s interactive exhibit where the finalist’s projects are on display for the world.

Happy Data Mapping!

The fall season provides a lot of fresh starts for many. The heat of summer and laxity subside as school semesters commence and vacations wind down. With these endings come new beginnings and the time for civic engagement has never been more rife.

From September 30 to October 2 join CartoDB at Code for America Summit, an international open source conference, held in Oakland, CA. CartoDB’s data technologist, Santiago Giraldo along with Roger Keren, our business developer, will be there to meet you.

For three days U.S. government leaders, technologists, and community members will brainstorm ways to transform government together using open source technology. Here some of the best minds come up with ways to make government services simple, effective, and easy to use.

Come join us at Oakland’s Marriott City Center, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. to chat and learn ways to make data-driven visualizations work for your city.

What’s more? Andy Eschbacher and Mamata Akella will also be giving CartoCamp workshops at Stanford University and a talk at UC Berkeley!

Happy data mapping and see you in Oakland!

The City of Las Vegas goes by many names: Sin City, the City of Lights - but this month it will take a new name - Data Metropolis! A whole new world of opportunity exists in your data and for three days, over 150 sessions, with 4000 Splunk enthusiasts you can raise the stakes. There are no limits to what you can do with the massive streams of machine data generated by your business systems and technology infrastructure. Enhance your knowledge of data-driven products and apps with an ace up your sleeve, and solve your most important data challenges. We’re going to Vegas, baby!

CartoDB’s North American account manager Matt Forrest and solutions specialist, Chris Whong will be in Las Vegas, September 21 to 23 at the sixth annual .conf2015. We are excited to share more about CartoDB and to demo our new Splunkbase App ‘CartoDB Torque!’

On Tuesday, September 22 our ‘Birds of a Feather’ meetup will take place at an undisclosed location and time (shhh!). Learn more about geospatial analysis and data-driven mapping and get an exclusive demo of the ‘CartoDB Torque’ app for Splunkbase. Tweet using the hashtag #CartoDBSplunksData - and we’ll send you the details.

Wednesday, September 23 from 6p - 8p we will be hosting a CartoDBeers event at Rouge, located inside the MGM Grand. Join us to talk more about location-intelligence visualizations and Splunk, and get first access to ‘CartoDB Torque.’ RSVP for CartoDBeers here.

We would love to meet up with our users, partners, prospects, and anyone interested in the power of CartoDB and how to transform your data into insights and help you leverage your operational intelligence. We’ll deal you in!

Hope to see you there.

Happy Data Mapping!

Qlik Sense users no longer have to rely on just the classic way of visualizing important decisions. Now in addition to graphs, pie charts, and other visual analytics, Qlik Sense users can use CartoDB’s slick Torque animated maps as well as additional visualization renderings. CartoDB for Qlik enables the creation of data-driven maps to visualize location data within the Qlik Sense Dashboard, which is personalized to maximize analytics to get the most impact and insights from your data.

The CartoDB for Qlik app lets you animate your temporal location data directly on an interactive map and understand how your data has grown, moved, or changed over time and space. Using CartoDB’s Torque technology bring data to life by incorporating spatio-temporal analysis and the power of animated maps. Torque maps are perfect for extracting insights from the location data you have in Qlik allowing you to get to the bottom of your most important decisions.

The Torque library lets you render big, timeseries, heatmaps, or categorical data. This is useful for many modern applications that need more than just a static map. Torque has been used to visualize human movement, Twitter activity, biodiversity data, and many more large-scale datasets.

"At Qlik, we are very excited to welcome CartoDB to our Tech Partner ecosystem. With their new extension, 'CartoDB for Qlik’, Qlik customers will be able to take their geospatial analytics to the next level and leverage CartoDB’s industry expertise. CartoDB empowers Qlik customers to address a number of different use cases including the development of geospatial heat maps, plotting multiple series on a map, and the solutions to see data movement over time. Now, Qlik users will be able to incorporate in their applications CartoDB geospatial visualizations easily by using CartoDB’s extension." Michael Foster, Vice President, Strategic Partners.

CartoDB can handle millions of records (translation: an ENORMOUS amount of data) and that data can be filtered directly on the visualization and on related charts and graphs. CartoDB’s data-driven maps leverage the impact of your insights while giving your data more oomph. Our unique styling capabilities allow for multiple visualization features like:

• Torque Maps: Animate your Qlik time-stamped location data directly on an interactive map and understand how your data has grown, changed, and evolved over time and in different locations
• Heat Maps: Visualize your data to highlight areas of high activity similar to a static map. You can also animate your heat map with temporal data
• Category Maps: Assign color variants to your data in the visualization and see trends based on multiple segments of information

CartoDB for Qlik is just the first step to running a much deeper geospatial analysis with optimized visualizations. Become a CartoDB member in the process, add your data to CartoDB, and experiment with our full geospatial analysis and visualization capabilities. Once your data lives in CartoDB, you can embed any CartoDB map back into Qlik with our seamless Qlik extension.

Downloading CartoDB for Qlik is quick and easy — Simply go to the Qlik branch website, register with your Qlik credentials, search for ‘CartoDB for Qlik’, and hit ‘download’. Alternatively you can find CartoDB for Qlik within QlikMarket. CartoDB for Qlik is available as a free download.

Join a community of developers, cartographers, journalists, and data scientists. Get to the insights that really matter in your data and start making data-driven decisions through CartoDB for Qlik!

Real estate is an industry that relies heavily on data-driven insights and visualizations. Agencies, listing services, property departments all choose CartoDB to visualize their business and make insightful decisions.

Companies such as realestaste.com.us, Illustreets, HERE Platform, and Rightmove have used CartoDB to create amazing visualizations to allow businesses and individuals to stay up-to-date about the status of
city development.

GROW.LONDON developed by JLL and London & Partners using CartoDB, is a series of visualizations that show the city of London, in order to help businesses located there make real estate focused decisions easier.

Based on this amazing project CartoDB created a case study with the objective of showing people how they can make decisions for better cities and more accurate real estate predictions.

To learn more ways that CartoDB is used in the real estate sector view the
case study:

Learn more!

In this two page study you will discover London and uncover new insights on:

• Demography: Population, Employment, and Economy
  
• The characteristics of London’s markets and their status - established, emerging, and future
  
• London’s history: a chronology of London landmarks and developments
  
• Residential market: housing prices, annual and current changes
  
• London’s existing transportation network and prospective infrastructure projects
  

Happy data mapping!