Industry News
Apple has announced rules for advertisements on Apple Maps, to be introduced later this summer in the US and Canada. Some businesses will be prohibited from advertising on Apple Maps, while others will be vetted.
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:
Notably, it prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, like plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, and general contracting services, among others. […]
In addition to banning home services, the policy prohibits a handful of businesses from advertising on Maps, like cryptocurrency ATMs and bail bonds providers. […]
Apple is also taking a hands-on approach to approving ads for businesses offering medical services, as the policy notes these ads will be “evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”
If ads must appear on Apple Maps, they should be limited to businesses that operate from a shop or office I can physically visit. It avoids cluttering the map and is the right choice for user experience. If I’m looking for a plumber to fix a leak in my house, I won’t use a maps application; I’ll use a search engine. I need the plumber to come to my house; where they are and how I can get there isn’t relevant. Likewise, if I’m looking for a barber shop, I’m looking for a professional shop, not for Gabriel who cuts hair in his kitchen on weekdays after four.
Compiled by Matt Forrest, this year’s edition features almost 2,500 companies and organisations from 121 countries, all neatly categorised and searchable by organisation size, founding year and funding received. If you’re looking for a job in geospatial, start your search here.
Åsa Forsell:
Developers can now add detailed indoor airport maps to their application using the new Mapbox airport indoor maps tileset. Designed to seamlessly connect the outdoors and indoors, the tileset helps guide travelers and airport staff through more than 200+ international airports.
The airport indoor maps tileset can be used on the web and mobile SDKs with Mapbox Standard Style, and the tileset can be enabled in Mapbox Studio or via code. Pre-styled indoor layers and UI components are ready to use, reducing the time and resources required to design and maintain indoor maps from scratch. Teams that need more control can customize map styling and interactions to match the specific needs of their product and users. They can also add their own custom layers to show their own data on the indoor maps.
There’s a long list of potential use cases, including retailers allowing people to find their shops and airports managing logistics behind the scenes. Though airlines guiding passengers through busy airports, helping them find gates, lounges or help desks, immediately springs to mind.
Airlines delay flights for lost or late passengers and manage complaints from loyalty members who cannot find amenities.
I don’t think airlines delay many flights because passengers get lost finding the correct gate. Most late passengers get lost dawdling through the duty-free shop buying things they might as well get at their destination and then proudly strolling into the aeroplane with their five bags. Not all problems can be solved with better maps.
From a passenger perspective, the most convenient solution would be to integrate airport maps into Google Maps or Apple Maps (both of which do), which most people already use for day-to-day navigation. The second best place will be airline apps. I don’t want to download a separate app for every airport I pass through.
Apple Maps now shows the borders of Indigenous land in Australia and New Zealand.
Apple Newsroom:
Beginning today, Apple Maps now displays Indigenous lands in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. By gathering information from Indigenous advisors, cartographers, Traditional Owners, language holders, and community members, Apple Maps will show reserves and Indigenous Protected Areas, Indigenous place names, Traditional Country, and dual-language labels. Indigenous lands place cards feature information about the local area and Traditional Owners, and can be curated to allow communities to add their own photos, destinations on their land, and text in their own language. Representation of Indigenous lands in Apple Maps provides users with a more comprehensive experience while also recognising the stories and significance behind them.
According to the Guardian, dual place names have also been introduced throughout Australia.
Apple Maps will now include more than 250 dual placenames for cities and towns across the country, with more to be added.
I’m struggling to confirm this. On the latest versions of both macOS (15.3.2) and iOS (18.3.2), no traditional place names are shown instead or in addition to the English names. It’s technically feasible to show two names simultaneously for a location, as we’ve seen with Gulf-of-Mexico travesty—it just hasn’t been done.
When I search for “Naarm,” the traditional name of the Melbourne area, only “Melbourne” shows up as a match. Likewise, a search for “Gadigal” or “Cadigal” returns matches in the Sydney area, like “Gadigal Station,” but not Sydney itself.
Good publicity for Apple, but a job half done.
If you are a student or early-career developer and want to make your mark in open-source geospatial, the following geospatial organisations are participating in the 2024 Google Summer of Code:
Applications from candidates will be accepted between 18 March and 2 April, while the internships run for 12 weeks over the summer.
The Protomaps project, a set of protocols and software for serving fast map tiles over the Web, is transitioning to a new funding model.
Previously, Protomaps’ main source of funding was selling one-time downloads of basemap tiles. Now you can purchase access to commercial, hosted tile APIs and hands-on support through the project’s GitHub sponsorship page:
- For $14, you get one million tile requests via the commercial API. The tileset is derived from the Daylight Map Distribution, which includes data from OpenStreetMap but has gone through additional quality checks.
- For $140, you get fifty million tile requests via the API, plus an optional downloadable tileset in case you’re looking to host the tiles more cost-efficiently should you exceed the allowance.
- Then there are two access tiers for $2,000 and $4,000, which give you access to Protomaps developers to provide support and consulting services.
In addition, all components needed to produce PMTiles and run the Protomaps infrastructure are open source; you can run the APIs yourself for the infrastructure cost only.
Developing open-source projects and financing them by selling professional services for development, maintenance and knowledge transfer is an idea some German geospatial businesses, like Terrestris or Wheregroup, have successfully implemented for years. But I haven’t seen it yet for a company selling map tiles.
Development Seed’s data team in Ayacucho, Peru has spun out to form GeoCompas:
I am pleased to announce that the skilled data and annotation team from DevSeed is separating to become an independent employee-owned company called GeoCompas. The Geo AI practice at Development Seed has grown, and the GeoCompas team has been essential in providing crucial mapping, annotation, QA, and automation support. Their expertise in geodata is now available to everyone.
The new company focusses on OpenStreetMap editing, data labelling and annotation for AI projects, but also development of data processing pipelines and web services.
Tom MacWright
In short:
- MIT license
- TypeScript codebase
- Contributions welcome
Placemark is the map editor software-as-a-service that I built for several years. It’s a website where you can import, create, edit, export, publish, and visualize geospatial data.
The code is on GitHub and already receiving contributions.
Sad news from Placemark today, the platform is shutting down in January:
Well, I’ve made the decision to wind down my efforts on Placemark - it’s been a lovely journey thanks to great folks using it (like you!) but ultimately wasn’t self-sustaining financially.
Starting today,
- New signups will be disabled
- Existing paid users will have free access until January 19, 2024
- In January 2024 I’ll release the full source code for the application as open source
The writing has been on the wall since Tom MacWright wrote in January:
I’ve envisioned it as a tool that you can use for simple things but can grow into a tool you use professionally or semi-professionally, but maybe that’s not the future: the future is Canva, not Illustrator.
Tom was the creator and only person who worked on Placemark (as far as I know). It’s hard to compete as a one-person company, when products as impressive Felt launch at the same time.
A short programming announcement: In addition to Twitter and Mastodon, I’ve started posting updates to Bluesky.
I also have a couple of Bluesky invites to give away. If you’re interested, shoot me an email at letters@latlong.blog. Yes I prefer email; I’m that old. I’ll send the invites out on a first come, first serve basis. I will be using your email adress for this purpose only, I won’t store your email or sign you up for a newsletter.
I’d like to use the occasion to remind everyone that the feeds are the best way to get notified of new content on the site. No sign-up required, you get full articles delivered to your favourite feed reader, and you get to support the open web.
Geofencing business Radar introduced a new suite of APIs, aiming to get a slice of Google Map’s and Mapbox’ business:
Radar Maps Platform has it all, including base maps, geocoding APIs (forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, IP geocoding), search APIs (address autocomplete, address validation, address autocomplete), routing APIs (distance, matrix, route optimization, route matching, directions), and UI kits (address autocomplete).
Our beautiful vector base maps support classic, dark, and light themes. You can easily add base maps and UI kits to your website with v4 of the Radar JavaScript SDK.
There is nothing ground-breaking in the announcement; the features offered in the platform are the pretty standard. But Radar’s pricing is competitive, so you might as well keep this one on our radar. (Yeah, I love a rubbish pun.)
A new map style has been added to the OpenStreetMap site:
It’s a mix of osm-carto and OpenTopoMap. It has many improvements: more tag support (busway, embankment, cuisine, solar plants, aquaculture, pitch, sea, tree etc.), CJK fonts, etc. There is also better internationalisation: country specific road shields, peaks using imperial system in the US, hierarchical place rendering in China, etc.
Zoomed in, it looks a lot like the standard OSM styled. In lower zoom levels, it reminds me of school atlases I grew up with. Very nice.
Stamen won’t be hosting their iconic and very popular map tiles any more. Instead, Stadia Maps will host Stamen’s maps tiles going forward:
We’re partnering with Stadia to move our tiles to their servers, and working closely with them to make sure that our beloved map styles keep running well into the future, and better than ever. They’re experts in running well-maintained map serving infrastructure. For most users, switching over will be as simple as setting up a Stadia account, and changing a few lines of code. For most non-commercial customers, there’ll be no service disruption, no tracking, and the price tag will continue to be free.
Stamen’s tile service will be discontinued in October; until then existing tile URLs will redirect to Stadia’s servers.
What this means:
- You’ll need a Stadia Maps account.
- You need to point your application to the Stadia URLs by October.
- You might have to pay if you’re application serves more than 200,000 tiles per month or if you’re using the tiles with a commercial application.
- All Stamen map designs will be ported to Stadia, and most styles are now available as Vector tiles too.
Considering Stadia’s generous free tier this is a fair compromise. Stamen generously made their tiles available for free for a very long time. Running a tile service needs people and the infrastructure costs money, and we can’t take it for granted that a small cartography shop provides an essential service for free forever.
A huge list of geo people and organisations on Mastodon, manually curated by Florian Ledermann. Comes with a handy export tool so you can bulk-follow everyone.
Radiant Earth announced two initiatives to further the development and sharing of machine-learning models and the adoption of cloud-native formats for geospatial data.
Source Cooperative aims to provide a marketplace for machine-learning models and training data:
Source Cooperative builds upon Radiant MLHub’s legacy as a neutral and trustworthy data publishing platform and will enable the publication of a wider variety of datasets in addition to machine learning training data products and machine learning models. For anyone who has any kind of data or machine learning models that they need to share, Source Cooperative will allow them to upload it, define how open they want it to be, and even charge for it if they want to.
It sounds a bit like GitHub, but for machine-learning models and training data, with integrated monetisation. The new platform will replace Radiant MLHub, which will end operations in October 2023, and all data will be migrated to Source Cooperative.
Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation aims to advance the adoption and development of cloud-native geospatial data formats through educational materials and supporting software development efforts.
Both activities are in very early stages with very little detail. You can contribute by participating in community surveys for each initiative.
Felt added support for raster data like GeoTIFF, XYZ tile services and images:
Today we are announcing three new features that make raster files easier to work with than ever before:
- The ability to upload raster files as layers on your map.
- The ability to add any XYZ URL from sources such as Planet, or other imagery providers, which will dynamically load external imagery.
- A set of purpose-built OSM layers, such as streets and building footprints, to complete your map quickly.
There’s a real danger that this is becoming a Felt fan blog but they keep delivering well-designed and useful features that strip away a lot of the complexity that comes from working with geospatial data. While we have seen most Felt’s functionality before in traditional GIS, their approach to reimagining known functionality to make map making more accessible to non-GIS crowds is truly ground-breaking.
Dylan Loeb McClain, New York Times:
Ms. Norwood, a physicist, was the person primarily responsible for designing and championing the scanner that made the program possible.
[…]
Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy — like one that had been used for local agricultural observations — could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.
Imagine what the open-source world could look like if the Amazons and Googles of the world would do the same for the open-source software they use.
Rebecca Bellan and Ingrid Lunden, reporting for TechCrunch:
Last month, when transportation startup Via raised $110 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, CEO Daniel Ramot said it planned to make acquisitions to grow its transportation technology stack. Now, a piece of that strategy is falling into place: today the company is announcing its acquisition of Citymapper, the London startup that produces a popular urban mapping app.
I always loved Citymapper. When it came out, it offered a better experience for public-transport routing than Google Maps. I remember moving to London, and Citymapper was a lifesaver; I could not imagine how anyone would navigate the city without it.
But then, I never understood how they were making money—if any. Citymapper offers memberships, which enable additional routing modes, but I don’t think bus-only routing convinces many people to pay for the service. They also sold public-transport passes in London at discounted rates and, more recently, the app’s free tier contained ads. This acquisition is about talent and technology rather than removing a competitor from the field.
AWS is extending Amazon Location Service, their range of geospatial products, with “Open Data Maps”. It offers four base maps developers can use as background maps in their applications: A light and dark standard map, plus a light and dark monochrome design as a background for data visualisations. The maps were designed by Stamen and are mainly based on OpenStreetMap data via Daylight.
Open Data Maps will be a serious option for organisations with high usage, which serve more than 200,000 tiles each month. The pricing for map tiles is quite competitive and lower than that of similar products from Mapbox or MapTiler.
| Number of tiles served |
AWS |
Mapbox |
MapTiler |
| 100,000 |
$3.50 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
| 200,000 |
$7.00 |
$0.00 |
$25.00 |
| 300,000 |
$10.50 |
$25.00 |
$25.00 |
| 500,000 |
$17.50 |
$75.00 |
$25.00 |
| 1,000,000 |
$35.00 |
$200.00 |
$75.00 |
After OSMCha, OpenStreetMap US now also supports MapRoulette as a Charter Project.
MapRoulette is a vital tool within the broader OpenStreetMap ecosystem, guiding mappers to areas needing contributions.
MapRoulette serves the mapping community as a user-friendly tool for systematic improvement of completeness, quality and accuracy of map data. Mappers from over 70 countries review more than 40,000 tasks a month. More than 330,000 changesets in 2022 alone can be directly attributed to MapRoulette.
With Charter Projects, OpenStreetMap US aims to ensure long-term stewardship of critical open-source tools for OpenStreetMap. It provides projects with a home and the ability to raise funds for further development.
The mentor organisations for this year’s Google Summer of Code have been announced. Amongst other open-source household names, Google Summer of Code 2023 features various organisations and projects from the geospatial world, including:
Google Summer of Code is an internship program which pays aspiring software developers to contribute to open-source projects for three months during the summer. The application phase for this year’s cohort of interns opens on 20 March and closes on 4 April.
Say what you want about Google, but you have to appreciate their ongoing commitment to open-source software and their efforts to connect young programmers with projects.
For a recent story, instead of Mapbox, The Post used OpenMapTiles, Maputnik, PMTiles, and MapLibre to produce interactive web maps.
Kevin Schaul:
For some projects, I’m sure we’ll continue using Mapbox. But for most of our use cases, we don’t need the latest and greatest. And Mapbox has gotten expensive.
Google Maps is no longer served from the subdomain maps.google.com but from a path on Google’s main domain (google.com/maps). If you’re allowing Google Maps to use your location, Google can now use it on all sites under google.com.
Because it seems like Twitter is on the cusp of extinction,
I’ve set up a Mastodon account over at Mapstodon—like everyone else. I will primarily cross-post the same updates on Twitter and Mastodon. Follow along for the ride at @latlong@mapstodon.space.
TomTom announced a new map platform:
To create a standard base map that anyone can contribute to and benefit from, the TomTom Maps Platform is bringing together a pool of map content from map users around the world. The resulting geolocation database – the largest available today – feeds continuous improvements back to the map, helping it keep up with reality.
The pool is filled with an array of sources, including OpenStreetMap, sensor-derived observations (SDO) from millions of vehicles, probe data and shared points of interest (POI). It’s a dizzying amount of data that we quickly make sense of, validate and act on.
There’s a marketing page and a video featuring dramatic music and Steve Coast saying very little: “Maps are used way more than people think but it’s invisible to us. As things get quicker, we have to change the way we think about maps.”
Is this new product primarily OpenStreetMap data and some additional data sprinkled on top? Does it have an API? Map tiles? An SDK? It’s hard to tell as the material was written by marketing people for people in suits.
We will have to wait for further announcements to understand what TomTom’s new map platform can do.
Steven Feldman, analysing What3Words’ 2021 accounts:
The business is powering ahead despite a small fall in sales to £444,382 (no I have not missed out a couple of zeros), they have managed to increase losses from just under £17m last year to just under £44m this year.
To earn £1, What3Words spent almost £100 in 2021. My understanding of economics and running a business is minimal, but that doesn’t look like a healthy business. But the investors keep the money tap open, so everything is fine.
From the MapLibre blog:
[MapLibre] is Amazon Location Service’s recommended map renderer and forms the basis of AWS Amplify Geo’s map display and geocoding capabilities. We’ve been excited to see the project grow since it launched in 2020 and look forward to continuing our work with the MapLibre Organization.
MapboxGL’s license change happened in December 2020. Amazon’s location services debuted only a few days later. MapLibre was forked from MapboxGL after the license change. Is anyone still wondering why Mapbox changed the license for Mapbox GL?
Outreachy has opened applications for the winter cohort of interns beginning in December 2022.
Outreachy is an internship program designed for young people to make their first mark in open-source software development, specifically people from underrepresented groups in the tech industry. (So, if you’re a European white dude, you don’t need to apply.) The internships come with a $7,000 stipend for three months and are fully remote.
The mentoring projects for the next round will only be announced at the end of September. Still, it usually includes projects with a data-collection and data-management focus, some with a geospatial element. The most recently completed round included interns at Ushahidi and ODK-X.
The program is an excellent opportunity to get into open source and add a fantastic project to your portfolio. I’ve mentored Outreachy interns before, and some went to build successful careers at big names such as RedHat and Google. (Obviously, because my former mentees are smart and driven software engineers and not because I’m a particularly great mentor.)
Planet outlines its updated strategy, aiming to become a company that doesn’t just operate earth-observation satellites and provides remote-sensing data. Planet wants to be a company that also runs an earth-data platform allowing users to gather insights from Planet’s data.
The most interesting part of the marketing material is that it’s one of the rare cases that (sort of, in a sugar-coded way) admits that their product isn’t just used to save the environment or ensure every human can eat. Geospatial products are often used to achieve questionable goals, including fighting wars:
There are also security threats, very present as we write this during the war in Ukraine, for which the transparency created by daily broad coverage imagery can help illuminate events in a factual, unbiased and democratized way, reducing likelihood of miscalculation and escalation, and providing a common operating picture for society.
Working in geospatial, we all want to use our skills to create tools or to produce data that ultimately contribute to a better life on earth. But the companies we work for still have to make money, and the clients with the deepest pockets usually aren’t the ones that primarily care about world peace and ensuring every human on earth is well off — a conundrum Tom MacWright captured previously in Ethics in Geo.
Will Cadell, CEO of Sparkgeo, starts a newsletter:
Starting up a substack to talk about the super-niche topic of strategic geospatial thinking and tools. It’s going to be like 6 of us, but you’re invited. The bonus is that we get to see into the future and, if we are really clever, we get to sculpt it too.
Very niche indeed, but this will be interesting if Will’s recent thread discussing the future geospatial market is any indication. I wish it was a blog and not on Substack. Thankfully there’s also a secret RSS feed if you don’t want to hand out your email to follow along.