

CloudMine Introduces Geospatial Object Querying - mweil
http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/15791739158/geoquerying

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jrubinovitz
Is this the Geolocation API the Marauder's Map team at PennApps used this to
build a virtual Marauder's Map? If so, now it suddenly makes sense how they
had time to make the awesome UI design. I definitely agree on the feedback
looking for examples. I'd love to see some open source Cloudmine apps.

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mweil
It is indeed! Marauder's Map runs on CloudMine.

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jasonkolb
I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what CloudMine is. It looks like a
server-side object store that also lets you execute server-side code, is that
right? Is there a sample use case somewhere that I missed?

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mweil
Right now, those are the essentials. Those two things are huge barriers to
entry for many people trying to write mobile apps, and people love when we do
it for them. Right now we are trying to cover our bases with the basic things
that almost all mobile apps need, and then we will start exploring more exotic
offerings. Keep on the lookout!

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us directly at team at
cloudmine dot me.

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JonLim
Very neat! Had no idea about CloudMine before, but always happy to see
alternatives to Parse and whatever other mobile backend service providers
there are out there.

Congrats!

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mweil
Thanks! Glad you know about us now. One of our big differences from Parse is
our focus on server-side requirements as well as client-side. Case in point,
our server side code execution environment. Check it out if you're interested.
[http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/15748285350/server-side-
superp...](http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/15748285350/server-side-superpowers)

~~~
chrisacky
mweil, I just spent 10 minutes on your website, and I still am finding it very
difficult to understand what it is you do.

Some tangible examples would really help prospective visitors. I remember
seeing the site before in an article on TechCrunch and thinking exactly the
same. The article on TechCrunch explains what it is that you do, a lot better
than your examples.

I don't want to "Get Started" in order to have to figure out how your product
can help.

I'm in the need for a mobile port of my application, so I really would like to
see all of the potential offerings that are out there, but CloudMine has
fallen way short on being able to explain what it is that you do? </trying to
be constructive criticism - so don't take it the wrong way>.

The site looks good though :)

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mweil
We've gotten a lot of great feedback about the copy on our website, and we
know it definitely has room for improvement. It's in the works. :)

In the meantime, there are a few examples in our other blog posts that you
could take a look at. Also feel free to email us directly (team at cloudmine
dot me) if you have any specific questions and I'd be glad to explain our
offerings in more detail.

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epaulson
Looks neat. No storage costs? Is there a catch on some size limits somewhere?
I looked through the API docs but didn't see any.

Point storage with radius queries are nice and all, but I'd love to find a
cloud storage provider that stored polygons and took polygons as queries, and
had pay only for what you use.

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mweil
You got it! No storage costs. We have a soft limit of 20k per object, but I
doubt many people are going to come close to brushing that. And it's all free
right now anyway.

Someone just tweeted at us earlier about GeoJSON (<http://geojson.org/>) which
looks pretty awesome for storing polygon data. It sparked a conversation
internally about a feature like that, especially since SimpleGeo (which
offered that, I believe) is gone.

That point aside, geofencing queries are coming soon. That means that instead
of just giving a center point and radius in your query, you can query with a
polygon defined by arbitrary points and we will return your objects that exist
inside that shape. Perhaps that could hold you over for the time being?

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epaulson
I want to do intersections of polygons - think "what neighborhoods have
overlap with this political district." Many systems seem to have one but not
the other, i.e. "store points, query by polygon", or "store polygons, query by
point(and maybe radius)".

Storing polygons is probably key - if there's a query-by-radius or bounding
box I can make an enclosing circle for my query and then do my own
intersection tests with my query polygon.

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greghinch
With the demise of SimpleGeo this is a welcome addition, look forward to
trying it out

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jyaker5281
Glad to see that you guys finally got that in. Nice work!

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NickEubanks
Congrats guys! Best of luck.

