Leading Mobile Developer Platforms Combined to Offer World-First Customizable Developer Tools and Location-Based Services for iPhone and Android

Menlo Park, CA, January 7, 2011 – CloudMade, the leading provider of development tools for the emerging location-based app market, has acquired OneStepAhead (OSA), a global provider of next-generation navigation software.

This acquisition brings together OneStepAhead’s on-device map database and rendering engine with CloudMade’s unique approach of delivering highly customized maps and location data, developers gain even more flexibility and control of the user experience that they deliver to their customers — creating unique apps that perfectly match the needs of their users.

The announcement follows CloudMade’s $12.3M Series B funding led by Greylock Partners in 2010, and merges CloudMade’s expertise in the fields of geo-platforms and developer tools with OSA’s unique on-device map caching, update and rendering technologies.

“With an increasing percentage of apps now incorporating maps and/or location services, developers now have a one stop shop to use location to create an outstanding user experience on any device,” said Nick Black, Head of Products and Co-founder, CloudMade. ”We are delighted to bring OSA’s leading mapping and customization tools into the CloudMade platform, so every developer can add the most monetizable services to their apps simply and rapidly.”

“CloudMade is transforming the way location services can be incorporated into a mobile app. We are delighted to become part of CloudMade and together continue to offer developers and consumers the most advanced and intuitive experience,” said Nihat Küçük, CEO, OneStepAhead.

CloudMade’s free tool and services, used by its developer community of over 16,500 developers, enable the development of location-enabled apps that are always up-to-date, fast-to-load and navigable even in areas of poor network coverage. Adding the ability to develop for iPhone, Android and the web significantly reduces the time required to produce mobile apps while providing a consistent look and feel for map-based applications across all major iPhone and Android device types.

CloudMade integrates with OpenStreetMap, a wiki map of the world with over 300,000 users worldwide, a user-base that doubles every eight months, making over 7,000 edits per hour. Because its contributors capture map data that is relevant to their interests — which could be anything from cycling, jogging, hunting, and skiing to diving and climbing — and they map and update their neighborhoods regularly, CloudMade is able to provide a level of map detail, freshness and relevance not offered by any other map provider.

To register to join the CloudMade developer program, visit: http://developer.cloudmade.com.

-ENDS-

About OneStepAhead

Founded in 1999, OneStepAhead is a geospatial technology services company operating on a global scale and combining extensive software development capability in its “center of excellence” in Stuttgart with local customer interface and project management. OSA advanced to a leading market position thanks to its unique software technologies and core competencies: location-based services, digital mapping, telematics, traffic information and personal navigation systems. The company draws on this strong foundation to create measurable business impact for customers around the world, resulting in long-term relationships with several of the most recognized names in their respective industries.

Click to jump to: Application Spotlight | News | The Interview | Code Examples

Application Spotlight:A Day’s Outing and Ask Your Target Market

This month, we’re featuring an innovative iPhone application for consumers looking for an ideal leisure outing and a website providing businesses with quality online research at competitive prices.

A Day’s Outing (Find out more aboutA Day’s Outing in our App Gallery – have an app you’d like featured? Tell us about it)

A Day’s Outing discovers nearby local events and great day trip activities. From the nearest museum, park or winery to a fair or festival that you had no idea was happening. Whether you are starting from home, or are traveling and looking for the perfect vacation side trip, A Day’s Outing will help you find the hidden adventures around every corner.

“We choose CloudMade because there’s no other service out there that delivered the same functionality and at the same time was so easy to integrate.” Elizabeth Muse, A Day’s Outing’

CloudMade tools used: Geocoding, Map Tiles, Routing, Style Editor, iPhone SDK

Ask Your Target Market (Find out more about Ask Your Target Market in our App Gallery – have an app you’d like featured? Email us about it)

Ask Your Target Market gives you serious market research at silly prices. For those who cannot afford the money and time associated with traditional market research, AYTM is your online, self-service market research platform with a built-in U.S. consumer panel.

“We are thrilled with the elegance of CloudMade platform. It allowed us to customize the maps to blend right in the overall experience of our app.”  - Lev Mazin, Ask Your Target Market

CloudMade services used: StyleEditor, Web Maps API

News

Get our Location Based Ads today – you can be up and running in a few hours

We know you’ve all be eagerly awaiting the release of our location based advertising platform well its now out of private Beta and available for everyone to start implementing. Your apps don’t need maps in them for you to benefit just the ability to call in for a user’s location. You’ll start reaping the rewards straight away with a 50% premium return on standard mobile ads and up to 99% fill rates. So what are you waiting for try out our sample code today.

Learning more about developers’ needs at Apps World Last week at Apps World Conference and Exhibition industry experts and newbies gathered together to discuss the current state and future of mobile applications development. We led a session about how location is helping to create and monetize outstanding apps. Cloudmade also exhibited in Developers Zone, meeting with new and existing developers, trying to understand how we can help you build better user experiences and increase revenue. Read more here…

The Interview – Ask Your Target Market

This month we interviewed Lev Mazin, CEO & cofounder for AskYourTargetMarket, which is featured above in our applications spotlight. The company uses CloudMade maps for plotting where their respondents come from, to give customers a better idea of the regional mix of their survey results. The CloudMade Coder caught up with Lev to find out more.   Read interview…

And now for The Code…

We know you’re keen to get started with our tools so here are some more code samples to help you:

Supercharge Your Web App with Facebook Places

With just 60 lines of code you can now tap into the largest social network on the planet and add an exciting social media element to your web app. You could implement this code in a number of different ways: for example, in a bar or restaurant finder web site to immediately see which of your friends have been where and when. Other possible examples might include, web sites where you want to include a travel diary element to promote interesting places to visit. More information and example code here.

Leaflet for OpenSource Developer is here

Leaflet is a lightweight, OpenSource JavaScript library for displaying incredibly smooth, feature-rich maps in a wide variety of apps both for web and mobile. It will form the core of CloudMade’s next generation JavaScript API. We’re looking for your help to make it even better.

It is built from the ground up to work well on both desktop and mobile web browsers, utilizing cutting-edge technologies included in HTML5. Its focuses on providing a great user experience, top performance, A-grade browser support (up to IE6), and there’s a high degree of flexibility in modifying the API. The OOP-based code of the library is designed to be modular, extensible and very easy to understand. You can find documentation for it here.

That’s it for this issue, look out for the next installment and remember to email thecoder@cloudmade.com for any content suggestions.

Ask Your Target Market is an online, self-service market research platform with a built-in U.S. consumer panel. It is a great solution for those who cannot afford the money and time associated with traditional market research. Founded in 2008, AYTM was created to break down the cost barrier keeping targeted market research inaccessible to the last majority of small businesses, entrepreneurs and marketers. Lev Mazin is the co-founder and CEO.

1. How did you come up with the idea for your web product?

We have developed an awesome Facebook application that didn’t take off as fast as we wanted so we didn’t have enough users to ask what was wrong with it. We looked around and realized that there is no affordable & time efficient way to conduct market research for a startup like ours. We had to build one starting with a consumer panel and quickly learned that such platform is highly needed for a way wider circle of companies – from marketing agencies to small-mid businesses, from business students to nationwide media giants.

2. How is CloudMade map data integrated into your website?
One of the way we show the survey stats to our clients is by showing the respondents on the map. You can click on any of the dots to open a pop up and look through the traits and answers of the respondents from our consumer panel who have completed the survey.

3. What was the main engineering challenge for you?
None really. Great clean API. It took less time to integrate than GoogleMaps.

4. Which CloudMade tools did you use?
Map designer (adjusted colors), Map API.

5. Have you tried other mapping providers before deciding to use CloudMade? What makes CloudMade different?
Google Maps. CloudMade is cleaner for our needs. We didn’t need satellite view or too much data on the map. It works very fast and uniquely customizable.

6. When did you launch and how many people / visitors are using your site to date?
We have implemented CloudMade maps in the fall of 09 and have many tens of thousands of users now.

7. What keeps you up at night / what do you worry about?
Thanks to CloudMade – nothing related to the maps keeps me up at night

8. What CloudMade products really excite you?
Style Editor. It really allows you to control the look and feel of the maps in your application, adds beauty and elegance to them.

9. Any new features you plan to introduce in your website in the near future?
We are constantly working on new features. Recently released video response type of surveys where survey takers can simply record their opinions with their Web cams (wish there would be a simple and elegant CloudMade-like solution here). Next stop is subscription plans with White label and many other “Easter eggs” for our clients.

10. What can you advise other developers planning to build location-based products?
Feels like more and more apps and objects/tools in our life will become location-aware in the near future. It’s a good time to implement now as it only will become cheaper and more popular from now on.

]]> http://cloudmade.com/press/2010/12/09/ten-questions-with-lev-mazin-from-ask-your-target-market/feed/ 0 http://cloudmade.com/press/2010/08/03/the-cloudmade-coder-issue-4/ http://cloudmade.com/press/2010/08/03/the-cloudmade-coder-issue-4/#comments Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:20:49 +0000 paul http://www.cloudmade.com/press/?p=862

The CloudMade Coder – Issue 4

News, tips & tricks for mobile & web developers looking for geo-solutions

Click to jump to: Application Spotlight | News | The Interview | Code Examples

This month in The Coder: Digital Footsteps in ‘The Interview’ hot seat; London Cycle and Media Street featured in the apps spotlight, details about our new $12.3M funding, our hot new iPad & iPhone SDK and Xcode installer and yet more code examples from us – enjoy. As always, email us suggestions for featured apps, content or if you’d like to take part in ‘The Interview’.

Nick Black, Co-founder & Head of Products

Application Spotlight: London Cycle and Media Street

This month, we’re featuring apps for London. The first, London Cycle, is a highly popular iPhone app developed by FIPLAB Ltd for finding the location of city-funded bikes and the second is Media Street, a website which makes locating stores in popular shopping areas in London, UK a breeze.

London Cycle: Free Maps & Routes (Find out more about London Cycle in our App Gallery – have an app you’d like featured? Tell us about it)

The London Cycle: Free Maps & Routes app has been developed to help users of the official Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, which launched on July 30th. The app is the perfect companion tool for the new service, allowing users to plan routes and locate the closest cycle stations using their iPhones, iPods and iPads when traveling in London. As Transport for London (TfL) opens up more data on the service, FIPLAB Ltd plans to add live cycle counts at each of the station.

After a successful launch in the app store, FIPLAB Ltd is very keen to add programmers to their team who can port the app to Blackberry and Android mobile platforms. Contact Rishi if interested.

CloudMade tools used: Map Tiles, Routing

Media Street(Find out more about Media Street in our App Gallery – have an app you’d like featured? Tell us about it about it)

Media Street runs sites including kingsroad.co.uk, nottinghillgate.co.uk and fulhamroad.co.uk. It is focuses on mapping local businesses – giving them their own web page and enabling users to interact with an easy-to-use local map. CloudMade enabled MediaStreet to customize the look and feel of each map on its site. This was important for maintaining the branding of their local sites rather than using a more generic Google map.

CloudMade tools used: Style Editor, Map Tiles, Marker Clustering

News

We’ve raised $12.3M in Series B funding!

We’re extremely pleased to announce that we have received $12.3M in a Series B round of funding led by Greylock Partners, which also includes our original investor Sunstone Capital.

This new investment will be used by CloudMade to expand our support to you in building and monetizing apps, products and services that use maps and location. You can read the press release here.

Xcode installer now available

To help you get up and running quicker when creating iPhone apps with our platform, we’ve created an Xcode installer, which automatically configures Xcode to work with our iPhone SDK. So what are you waiting for, give it a try here.

Calling all iPad developers! Take our new iPhone & iPad SDK for a spin!

Some of our early beta testers for our iPhone & iPad SDK were recently featured in Forbes about their cool iPad navigation apps. We’ve been putting the final touches to the new version of the SDK and we expect it to be available early next week. This SDK lets you bring customized map styles to your iPad or iPhone app, and build native apps that include search and driving directions. It’s also free to use!

Check out the next AppFest gatherings

The purpose of AppFest is to provide a live forum for developers to meet with users in order to improve their products, and understand how their customers use their apps. It will also serve as an opportunity to promote their apps, find new talent, meet potential partners, and learn about new technologies.

The first show is scheduled for Saturday, September 25, 2010, in Waltham, MA, with a second show lined up for Saturday, October 23, in Sunnyvale, CA. Each show will feature a unique set of exhibitions, entertainment and ideas. More at http://www.AppFest.net

The Interview – Digital Footsteps

This month we interview Yuriy Pryadko, project manager for Digital Footsteps, a company with a platform that connects personalized, media rich information to users on location. Digital Footsteps uses CloudMade maps for navigation, to guide users to the sights they want to see. The CloudMade Coder caught up with Yuriy to find out more.Read interview…

And now for The Code…

We know you’re keen to get started with our tools so here are some more code samples to help you:

Geocoding & Geosearch API

The Geocoding and Geosearch API lets you search through a global database for countries, places, roads, shops, businesses, amenities and more. The powerful service is accessed through an easy to use RESTful API, or through wrappers inside our iPhone SDK or Web Maps API. Both the RESTful service and the wrapped service are free to use for developers working with our Web Maps API or iPhone SDK. More information and example code here.

PHP API Now fully integrated with the CloudMade platform

For all the PHP developers out there – we’ve just updated our PHP API (v.0.2). The open source API now supports all the features of our platform, including: Static Maps, Vector Stream Server, Geocoding and Routing. All these services are compatible with the free open source content management system, Drupal used by millions of developers everyday. Like all of our server libraries, the PHP API is open source (L-GPL) so why not grab the source code and start hacking on it today! Download the API here, you can find documentation for it here.

That’s it for this issue, look out for the next installment and remember to email thecoder@cloudmade.com for any content suggestions.

Developer? Visit our Developer Zone

Digital Footsteps is a platform that connects personalized, media- rich information to users on location. Digital Footsteps believes every individual is unique and deserves to receive the information and ads that are important, relevant, and of interest to them. Whether they are traveling and want media rich information about the city they are visiting, or a freshman student lost in a 10 square mile campus looking for their first class, or a young couple looking for a house to rent, near a school and within walking distance to shops, these consumers will have the content that is relevant to them, delivered as needed wherever they are, at all times. Each will be navigated by sophisticated CloudMade maps to their location of interest and be provided with text, audio, video and images about the location when they arrive.

How does your product use CloudMade maps?

In a nutshell, we use CloudMade maps for navigation, to guide our users to the sights they want to see. Technically, we use CloudMade tiles and get routing data via the custom-built interface.

What was the main engineering challenge for you?

On-device routing for sure. We had to work hard on optimizing the routing algorithm, as well as on our own routing graph data format. We’ve started from simple A* and adjacency list, and it took around two minutes for the routing to initialize on the device. At the end, we optimized to 3-5 seconds for the map and routing engine to boot up and be ready to go.

How has CloudMade helped your development process? Which tools did you use?

I’ve already mentioned the custom routing data API CloudMade built for Digital Footsteps. In addition, we used Style Editor to fine-tune the map to show only user-relevant data, and to adjust the map colors to match our corporate brand. In fact, Digital Footsteps partners with the same software consultants – Cogniance – as CloudMade, so there was a good opportunity for delivery teams to work together and to form a synergy resulting in a sophisticated product.

Had you tried other mapping providers before deciding to use CloudMade? What makes CloudMade different?

Our first prototype was made with Navteq maps – they have some nice pedestrian-targeted products, like Discover Cities. But, unfortunately, the coverage, being decent in Germany and England, is not so good around the globe – CloudMade definitely delivers here with community-based OpenStreetMap data. Also, map style selections were limited, and we had to literally ‘Photoshop’ the tiles to fit into our app’s color scheme – I never realized a company offered the ability to stylize maps until we discovered CloudMade.

When do you plan to launch?

We are currently in Beta and plan a commercial launch later this year. When this happens we will certainly make it public.

What platforms do you plan to release for?

At the moment, the app runs on J2ME-enabled handsets. We also plan to release natively on Android, iPhone and Blackberry.

What new CloudMade product or campaign really excites you?

Personally, I am excited about CloudMade making its services free, complete with location-based advertising and revenue sharing initiatives. By far the most important trait of an ad is its relevancy: people get annoyed about wrong ads, but love the ones that help them discover the products and services they need. Modern GIS tech allows a drastic increase in relevancy by adding one more layer of data to filter against, so users will get the right ads, advertisers have a better reach, and developers will get a revenue share. Also, free services mean faster ROI for companies, and more possibilities for talented individuals to innovate. It’s a win-win.

What do you worry about?

Technology gets more and more sophisticated – and its usage gets complex too. I am committed to, and welcome each and every chance to make this world a better place to live in – by the use of technology, of course. It is not enough to deliver a smart product – you have to make it easy and fun to use. I am not worried too much about the ever-increasing complexity of things around us, but I work hard to make them easier to use for everyone.

What do you think will be the next big thing in geo-enabled apps?

I am fond of augmented reality making its way from science labs to live applications. Together with location-based services it will create a lot of new and exciting opportunities to interact with the world around us.

Where does your company go from here?

As I said, we are on our track for commercial launch. Also, we are working with vendors to include our technology in different products. I can’t say much at the moment – please stay tuned, there’s a lot to come!

Want to contact Yuriy Pryadko?

Email: ypryadko@cogniance.com

Skype: yuriypryadko

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yuriypryadko

]]> http://cloudmade.com/press/2010/07/29/ten-questions-with-yuriy-pryadko-from-digital-footsteps/feed/ 0 http://cloudmade.com/press/2010/07/29/geocoding-geosearch-api/ http://cloudmade.com/press/2010/07/29/geocoding-geosearch-api/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:03:16 +0000 paul http://www.cloudmade.com/press/?p=721 You can find out more about terms of use here. Now lets take a look at the Geocoding and Geosearch service in action.

First, lets search for 10 hotels within 2000m of a point in London, UK:

http://geocoding.cloudmade.com/BC9A493B41014CAABB98F0471D759707/geocoding/v2/find.html?object_type=hotel&around=51.51384,-0.10952&distance=2000&results=10

Now we’ll search for the same hotels but return the results in JSON format:

http://geocoding.cloudmade.com/BC9A493B41014CAABB98F0471D759707/geocoding/v2/find.js?object_type=hotel&around=51.51384,-0.10952&distance=2000&results=10

Pretty cool hey?  The HTML request is great for debugging, but you’ll want to get the results as JSON format inside your application.

Hotels aren’t the only objects you can search for.  Ever wanted to see all of the lighthouses in California on a map?  Here they are:

http://geocoding.cloudmade.com/BC9A493B41014CAABB98F0471D759707/geocoding/find_structured/poi:lighthouse;+county:CA.js?return_location=true&active_page=0&results_number=10

You can find a full listing of supported object types here.  You can also use maps.cloudmade.com to help create the search queries.  Just enter your search terms, then click on the “Export” tab in the top right of the page to get the query string.  Very useful.

Get started with Geocoding and Geosearch here.

Developer? Visit our Developer Zone

Steve Coast, a co-founder of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company founded the OpenStreetMap community mapping project in 2004, and CloudMade draws its data from OpenStreetMap. Through application programming interfaces and other tools, CloudMade helps developers take advantage of OpenStreetMap’s geographical data to power their own location apps, then takes a share from the apps’ advertising revenue. Read more…

Developer? Visit our Developer Zone

Developer? Visit our Developer Zone