If you’ve been following my Twitters you’ll be well aware that I’ve just spent the past week in San Francisco. I came here to attend, and speak at, the launch event for CloudMade’s new APIs for location based services. CloudMade is a company that was launched around 18 months ago by Steve Coast, the founder of the OpenStreetMap project, and Nick Black, a core member of the OSM project. The aim of their company is to bring the power of crowd sourced data, specifically OSM data, to more developers and to commercial companies around the world. The first step of this was of course to develop some products to make this possible and to make them available to the world, hence this event.

The event was split into four main sections. Steve started by giving an overview of the OSM project, its history and some glimpses of what’s likely to happen in the future. Nick then came on stage to explain their ideas behind forming CloudMade and what they’re doing to get OSM data into the hands of more people. After this I and four other developers who have been working with CloudMade’s APIs got on stage to give 5 minute presentations about our experiences developing with the new APIs.

Andrew Turner, CTO of GeoCommons, explained how they have integrated CloudMade’s tiles into their Maker application and talked about how the new Style Editor enables great looking mashups. Jaak Laineste of Nutiteq told us how they’ve been integrating CloudMade’s tile, geocoding and routing services into their Mobile map libraries. I talked about my experiences working with the new APIs, though I won’t go into too much detail here as I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise for Thursday. Andre, of Advanced Flash Components, then showed us a live demo of CloudMade’s APIs being used in a flash application and showed the speedy responses that the API gave.

Cragg Nilson then talked more about the specific products that CloudMade are making available and how people can get access to them. Finally a Q&A; session allowed some light interrogation of the CloudMade team before we moved into another room for demo sessions. Jaak, Andre and I all had a plasma screen each that we used to demo what we’d discussed in our talks. The CloudMade team also demoed various other applications that were using their services, centred around a large range of mobile devices that are able to access the APIs using various applications.

I’ve been really impressed by what CloudMade are offering considering they are still a young company. While a large reason for the quality of their offerings is down to the great team they’ve built up, they do also have an advantage in that the data they’re using, and the license it’s built upon, allow them to offer so much more to the developers using their products. The OSM dataset is incredibly rich and can cover a wide range of features that often don’t get much coverage from standard data providers. Also because the data is free CloudMade can make all of it available in their APIs without having to worry about extra charges such as you might get if you wanted to return vectors from existing data providers.

Now the good news, if you’re reading this thinking “I wish I could’ve gone to San Francisco and seen these great talks”, you need not fret. The whole event is being repeated in London on Thursday 12th. It’s currently oversubscribed but if you are interested in going I believe they’ve managed to arrange extra room so there shouldn’t be a problem with more people going. This page should give more details about the CloudMade launch event in London.

Oh yes, and as a hint to what I’ll be talking about on Thursday, take a look at the new logo for one of my existing mapping sites:

mapme.at logo