Cloud Made – Launch Event
Last night I attended the CloudMade API launch event in London. CloudMade is a company providing professional services and products on top of Open Street Map. I really enjoyed the event. What impressed me most was the shear professionalism of it, they had obviously spent a lot of time think planning and rehearsing. This is something a lot of us should do a lot more of!
I find the concept of being able to define your own cartographic styling (using their style editor) to fit the look you want (i.e. to fit your website’s branding) very interesting. However, as this means that tiles have to be rendered on the fly, I will be interested to see what performance is like. Apparently there will be dynamic caching (but I am not sure how comprehensive this would be as each map style would need its own cache). To be honest this feels a bit like the ESRI ArcIMS approach circa 2002 (and we all gave up on that approach because of speed and scalability issues).
The other interesting information was the proposed business model. Usage of the CloudMade APIs will be free up to a specified transaction level. Then customers will be able to choose a transaction based charging model or (Cloud Made’s preferred) model of accepting advertising on the maps and potentially getting a share of the advertising revenue back. An interesting approach.
It was weird to keep on hearing the phrase “traditional Google mapping”, it is fascinating how perceptions of brands now change so quickly!
It was good to see John McKerrell talking about mapme.at (a location sharing social tool). It is great to see this application really maturing. See more on mapme.at here.
In summary it is great to have a new innovative and passionate new kid on the block shaking up the big boys in the web mapping world.
