CloudMade

CloudMade (cloudmade.com) formerly provided a platform for software developers to build geo-enabled applications. CloudMade made extensive use of OpenStreetMap data to provide mapping services.

CloudMade was founded in 2007 by OSM founder Steve Coast and long-term OSM contributor, Nick Black. Nick remains with CloudMade. There is more information on key staff below.

In January 2011 the company OneStepAhead was acquired as 'CloudMade Deutschland GmbH' [1]. However CloudMade Deutschland GmbH seems to be shutdown as the Android App Navdroyd has not been updated since mid-2012.

By 2015, CloudMade had pivoted twice, first to focus on location-based in-game advertising ("Zigi") and more recently to the "connected car" market. Most of its original OpenStreetMap products are no longer available, though an Enterprise tile-serving plan remains available.

Former Products and Services

• Leaflet - An open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. It is developed by Vladimir Agafonkin with a team of dedicated contributors. Vladimir used to work for CloudMade, and leaflet started out as sort of a CloudMade product. CloudMade is still credited on the Leaflet homepage, but it's open source and lives on github really.
• Web Maps Lite - Another javascript web mapping library which was a pre-cursor to leaflet. It was never open sourced, and seems to no longer exist.
• iPhone Maps Library - Is a set of iPhone libraries that allow developers to create iPhone applications that include maps, geocoding and routing, powered by CloudMade, based on OpenStreetMap data.
• Style Editor - Is a unique web based application that lets you completely customise the styling of maps. Using the style editor you can change the colour, size, thickness and visibility of features on maps as well as add and remove points of interest. Once the map has been created it can used via CloudMade's other APIs.
• Tile hosting - goes hand-in-hand with the above. Whether you're using one of the standard set of in-house styles, your own custom style, or somebody else's custom style, you can point a web map library (such as Leaflet mentioned above), or an iPhone map library, at CloudMade tile servers. Your end users generate tile request traffic hitting CloudMade's servers. This service was discontinued except of paying "enterprise" users in May 1st 2014.
• Routing Server - Provides point-to-point routing, based on OSM data through a simple HTTP API - at one time it was the only routing service based on OSM which respected turn restrictions.
• There is also an extensive set of open source apis that let developers get started using any of CloudMade's web services in Ruby, Python, Perl, Java and J2ME.

Contributions to OSM

Technical

• API v0.6 work - Former members of the CloudMade Engineering team, Andy Allan, Matt Amos, Shaun McDonald and Harry Wood worked as part of the OpenStreetMap dev team to deliver the new OSM API.
• The NoNames Layer on the front page ([2]) is a rendering of OSM data that highlights un-named streets. The concept came from Dave Stubbs and was developed by Andy Allan for CloudMade, who hosted it. This has been dropped from the OSM home page due to very few unnamed roads, and update issues.
• Mapzen editor (Old) was a Flex based editor being developed by CloudMade for OpenStreetMap. The editor is open source (GPL v2.0) and makes use of OAuth so it can be deployed on any website, paving the way for specialised editors (like cycle editors) in the future.
• CloudMade made extensive use of the Mapnik rendering library that OSM uses. Work was lead by Oleg and Andrii and the team have contributed various fixes back to the Mapnik source.

Mapping

Up until 2009 Cloudmade employed a team "Mapping Ambassadors" who attempted to kickstart the mapping community in the U.S. by traveling around running mapping events. This presumably helped, but it's not clear to what extent. The U.S. mapping community had struggled to get going at that time, perhaps due to the overwhelming TIGER fixup task.

At the same time a team of people in London worked on more technical aspects but also were very involved in running the 2008 London Mapping Marathon & 2009 Mapping Party Marathon, leading to improvements in the state of the London Map. There continues to be a lively London OSM community with some of the same people involved, but they are no longer with CloudMade.

Donations

CloudMade have variously donated money to OpenStreetMap for sponsorship of the 2008 and 2009 State of the Map conferences, and as part of the new server "Smaug" campaign.

• In March 2009 CloudMade donated €10,000 as a platinum sponser for State of the Map.
• In April 2009 CloudMade donated £2,000 to the OpenStreetMap Hardware Fund.

People

CloudMade no longer list their team members on their website, only some of the directors. In addition to these, there are a team of Ukrainian developers who work for CloudMade and other projects.

External Links

• CloudMade homepage the page appears to be down with the message: New site under construction - Get in touch:info@cloudmade.com