Multimap :: Blog

Conference season is approaching and the call for papers is closing this week on two conferences that are well worth attending. Both these conferences are great value for money, especially in the current economic conditions.

First up is the AGI’s GeoCommunity conference.

Not many people are aware on how much the conference has changed in the last 3 years. Historically it was based on a large Exhibition with a smaller conference format (Birmingham NEC and Earls Court days). While it was a good format for those days, over the years delegate numbers have declined. Under the leadership of the current Chairman Steve Feldman, it has been completely overhauled and now the focus is on the conference with a smaller exhibition.

Last year the conference attracted over 600 delegates who participated in more than 50 workshops, presentations and debates. This year, the conference is taking a further step forward and will unite the traditional GIS industry with the Neogeography geo community with the help of Christopher Osborne the founder of the London based #Geomob meetup group. You will also see a presence from Microsoft Virtual Earth and Andrew Turner, a well known Neogeography Evangelist will be the first plenary speaker.

The conference is a two day event in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and with early bird prices of £275 (Member) or £355 (non member) including accommodation, it’s extremely good value for money. If you want to present a paper or workshop, you can get it even cheaper.

The Call for papers closes this Friday May 1st, so jump in there!

Follow GeoCommunity at http://twitter.com/GeoCommunity
Join the GeoCommunity discussion on LinkedIn at http://twurl.nl/lrf4lh

Second up is the OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference. Multimap has supported the OpenStreetMap movement in the past, sponsoring them on several occasions.  Members use the GPS capability of mobile phones and aerial imagery, to create their own map of the world. The maps they create are available for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap community wants everyone to take part and they recently passed 100,000 mappers.

There is something in OpenStreetMap for everyone. Walkers, runners and cyclists can add running trails, footpaths and cycle routes to the map. Once you’ve been mapping a few times it becomes part of your hobby. The map below shows cycle paths in central Berlin.

The conference is in Amsterdam, from the 10th - 11th July 2009. The conference will feature three days of talks and is not to be missed by anyone interested in joining OpenStreetMap’s mapping project. Weekend tickets cost just €100 - and until Sunday 29th March you can get your ticket at a special early bird rate of €75.

The call for presentations closes this Sunday on the 3rd May 2009, and you can find out more about the event here.

Readers of this blog might feel that we talk rather a lot about the different map styles that we offer on multimap.com.

For many people, the simple style of maps that sites such as multimap.com offer work best for them, particularly when driving.

We are also frequently reminded by you however, that there are many other purposes for a using a map, rather than just driving. Anyone who loves things such as walking, cycling, climbing, camping, surfing and fishing in the UK, will know that nothing beats an Ordnance Survey map.

Multimap.com has offered the popular 1:50k Landranger maps as an alternative map style for some time, and I’m really pleased to announce the addition of the popular 1:25k Explorer maps on Multimap.com that add even more detail, depth and accuracy.

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The BBC have been running an interesting debate lead by Mary Spence (the president of the British Cartographic Society), in which she argues that online mapping sites are “wiping out history”. This is an area which we feel quite passionate about too. As mentioned in previous posts, we have invested lots of effort in providing standard maps as-well as traditional maps created by skilled cartographers who are firmly keeping history alive. For example:

• The famous Ordnance Survey Land Ranger map of Great Britain (as mentioned by Mary Spence)
• Collins Bartholomew London street maps
• Malaysia street maps by local Malaysian cartographers Navi&Map
• ..and many more to come!

That said, there is nothing wrong with our standard maps too, having a simple “base map” enables our users and customers to overlay their own content that is relevant to their needs. After all, one of the principal elements of cartographic design is a map “must be designed foremost with consideration to the audience and its needs” (Robinson, A.H,1953). There is not one size that fits all for our users. Online map users have many diverse needs, and in the last few years have become extremely educated in the use of online mapping sites and personal navigation devices. This means that online map providers like ourselves have had to be flexible, offering choice.

So if you are planning a holiday to the Lake District, please try our Ordnance Survey Land Ranger maps or if you are planning a city break you might want our standard maps with some landmarks and perhaps even some Bird’s Eye imagery, or if you simply want a map of wi-fi hot spots in Paris, then please take one. The choice is yours!

We’ve been releasing a lot of new Aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery lately, so we thought it was time to do the same for our maps.

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that we released maps of many new areas over the weekend on Multimap.com. We’ve combined our street level maps in Europe, with maps from Microsoft Virtual Earth that provide you with improved country and region level maps worldwide and new street level coverage of including…

Asia - Japan
Africa - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, South Africa
Eastern Europe -Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia
Central and South America - Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile

These new maps are available on Multimap.com today, and will be available via our Multimap API for business customers and Open API for developers over the next few weeks.

Our friends on the Microsoft Virtual Earth team have also just delivered another 20TB of Aerial and Bird’s Eye images, which also includes some new UK imagery. A big thank you to them all!!

Enjoy!!

We announced last month that we’re partners for Mashed 08 which is taking place this weekend at Alexandra Palace. To mark this occasion we’ve added some new features to the Multimap Open API that many of you have been asking for.

• High Resolution Aerial and Bird’s Eye from Microsoft Virtual Earth - All the great imagery that you see on Multimap.com is now available in the Open API.
• Local Information - As well as offering direct access to geocoding, routing, and static map services through our web services API, we have today added the ability to directly query our local information databases through the same REST style interface. This will enable you to mash data such as cash points, transport links, wi-fi hotspots and Wikipedia articles into your applications. Special thanks go to TeleAtlas and TotalHotspots for helping to make this happen.

In the last week or so, many of you told us that you have wanted to build mash-ups with data stored in OSGB x/y co-ordinates and grid references that are tricky to use with mapping API’s such as the Open API (which only tend to support WGS84 co-ordinates). To help make this easier, we’re making available a beta feature that allows you transform these co-ordinates so that you can place them onto our maps. We’ve put it together so quickly, that we haven’t had chance to finish to documentation for it, but Richard’s blog has much more.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to smarten up the sign-up process to make it more straightforward to get an API key. Existing Open API users will need to go back to the sign-up page and update your API key to get access to the new features.

For those of you going to Mashed, we’ve created a cheat sheet that has links to all the Multimap and Microsoft tools you can use, along with code snippets and links to tools and libraries that others have built.

The final batch of tickets has been released, but you’ll need to be quick as the tickets we released went in a few hours.

There will be a bunch of us wandering around at Mashed all weekend wearing Multimap t-shirts, and hopefully we’ll camp out in a corner armed with beanbags and Xbox’s, so come over and say hello.

See you there!!

The European Football Championship, hosted by Austria and Switzerland, starts today at Basel’s St. Jakob Park, and we’ve released some updated Aerial imagery of the venues to mark the occasion. This is part of the massive 69.2TB of new imagery just released, and Chris’s blog is worth checking out for more information.

With England spectacularly failing to quality, it’s down to the Multimap Istanbul office to get behind their national team (although we do have an English-born player ourselves!!!).

Everyone here in Turkey is getting very excited, and I have big hopes for local player Nihat Kahveci, who scored the winning goal to get us to the Championships.

There’s just the small matter of beating many peoples favourites Portugal at the Stade de Genève, followed by the host’s Switzerland (in front of packed home crowd in Basel), and then back to Geneva to meet the always dangerous Czech Republic, who beat the favourites Germany 3-0 on their way to qualifying!!! So no pressure then!?…

It all culminates with the Final at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium on June 29th.

Haydi Turkiye!!!!

We’re delighted to announce that we’re partners for Mashed 08, and the next 100 tickets are available exclusively through Multimap and Microsoft. The event promises to be a great blend of hacking and mixing, with maybe even some sleeping thrown in. If you didn’t attend Hack Day last year, you missed out. I’d encourage you to make your way to Alexandra Palace on Saturday 21st June and get mashed.

So, the important bit. We have 100 tickets now available here. You’ll need the code, which is “microsoft”.

If you miss out, keep watching because more tickets will be released over the coming weeks. Hope to see you there.

It’s now just over a year since we launched the ‘new’ version of multimap.com, which included a complete re-design of the user interface and took advantage of the latest browser technology to offer a rich user experience with a wide range of new features. Never a company to take its user loyalty for granted, we have continued to run the old site alongside the new one for those users who were not ready to move to the new site just yet.

Today heralds the start of another chapter at Multimap as we retire the ‘old’ site and move forward to embrace the next era of online mapping.

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When Matthew announced that we now have Bird’s Eye images in Australia, courtesy of Microsoft Virtual Earth, I messaged him afterwards and said “do you think most users actually know what Bird’s Eye is? They might get the wrong idea…” (we haven’t sent the Captain to sell Turkey Twizzlers in Oz for example). Little did I know he would challenge me to try to explain what it’s all about to you all, so here goes…

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A few weeks ago, we shared our plans for redirecting users from MSN UK and Live.com to www.multimap.com, while continuing to offer the maps.live.com experience for those who choose it.

Short story: today we implemented the plans we described then.

Longer story:

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