CloudMade Picks Up Open Innovation Award for its Mapping Platform that leverages Crowdsourcing
Rubs shoulders with Facebook and Twitter and shares podium with Formula 1 racing giant McLaren
London, UK – CloudMade, the platform and tools company serving consumers, mappers, developers and advertisers around the world, has won the prestigious Open 100 award, supported by the UK’s NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts). CloudMade won Best Company Innovating with Crowdsourcing, fending off other formidable entries in the crowdsourcing category such as Facebook, Twitter and Layar.
The winners were announced last Friday at the Open 4 Business conference at NESTA in the UK. The competition celebrates the power of openness and mass collaboration and was born out of NESTA’s search for the world’s top 100 companies innovating with openness. Winners of the other four categories included: McLaren (Innovation), WikiHow (Co-creation), Open Office (Open Source Software) and Zopa (Open Business).
“CloudMade was chosen because of its role in supporting the extremely effective crowdsourcing model in OpenStreetMap and leading it to a wider audience, through its social mapping tools and developer focused mapping platform,” said Roland Harwood, NESTA. “CloudMade is the catalyst in the communities of mappers, developers, data suppliers and the wireless industry to enable better applications with up-to-date community owned maps.
“We’re extremely pleased to be formally recognized as a leader in the open business world alongside such a distinguished group of companies”, said Nick Black, co-founder and Head of Products at CloudMade. “OpenStreetMap is the ‘people’s map’ – we’re simply opening it up to a much wider audience, removing the technical barriers to map editing with our Mapzen products and enabling developers to create successful apps through versatile APIs and customizable maps. Today, over 7,000 edits are made to the map every hour.”
CloudMade’s comprehensive and flexible mapping platform has been built from the ground up with the needs of mobile and web developers in mind. It empowers them with the freedom to create and monetize exactly the type of apps they envision, and allows handset vendors and operators to take control of their own destiny by giving them a key control point to create successful consumer applications that blend maps, navigation, advertising and local search.
The judges of the Open 100 awards included Mark Surman from Mozilla, Vic Keegan of the Guardian newspaper, Andrew Gaule of HI Network and David Simoes Brown and Roland Harwood from NESTA.
While there is no clear-cut definition of ‘openness,’ there is undeniably a trend to democratize and de-centralize previously closed business processes as the lines between consumers and producers blur. The Open 100 sees open businesses as companies that are opening up their innovation and production. Some are formed from the start around communities, while others are opening up their intellectual property to share with others. This promises better, faster and more efficient innovation.
Anyone can start mapping today using CloudMade’s mapping apps: Mapzen or Mapzen POI Collector – to get started visit: http://mapzen.cloudmade.com/
Developers looking to build map based mobile apps or websites should visit: http://developer.cloudmade.com
For a full list of Open 100 winners and entrants visit: www.openbusiness.cc
About NESTA
NESTA invests in early-stage companies, inform policy, and deliver practical programes that inspire others to solve the big challenges of the future.
NESTA does not work alone. Our success depends on the strength of the partnerships we form with innovators, policymakers, community organizations, educators and other investors. We bring the best ideas, new flows of capital and talented people together, and encourage others to develop them further.