

Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation - rameadows
http://mapbox.com/blog/knight-invests-openstreetmap/

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NelsonMinar
It's great that Development Seed is getting the funding. They are amazingly
innovative developers, the creators of TileMill and MapBox. They'll do great
work improving the OSM toolset.

TileMill is a marvel; if you ever wanted to try your hand at making map tiles
give it a shot. You can have a basic custom map up and going in 20 minutes.
It's particularly cool how they are delivering a Mac and Windows app based on
Node.js, of all things. It's terrific.

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WimLeers
Before they rocked the OSM world, they rocked the Drupal world :)

It is great to see they continue to innovate at a _very_ high pace! :)

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AndrewDucker
How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard?
Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its
results further?

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bluthru
It seems a bit hypocritical for Google to have and open source OS that gathers
mapping data from a proprietary source.

Down the road, I don't want Google to be the only one with enough mapping
knowledge to have self-driving car tech. That doesn't seem like data that
should be owned by a corporation.

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BitMastro
I don's see how it could be hypocritical, but anyway.. 1)Google Maps is not
part of the OS, but is a proprietary closed source application. 2)Nobody is
stopping you from building a better system, or improving OpenStreetMap
3)Cartographers obviously have ownership of the maps they build, more so, they
introduce errors to recognize unauthorized copies.

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tszming
The more we hate the Apple's map, the more we need to worry if our life is
depending too much on a particular company like Google or Facebook.

It is just the beginning, kudos to OSM, I really hope OSM can be as successful
as Wikipedia in the future.

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signalsignal
Apple wrote a software application which uses Openstreetmap and Tomtom. They
don't have an actual map data set like Google does.

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cpeterso
Users use apps, not map data. Apple's Map app is the gateway to mobile maps
for _many_ people. When Apple switches their backend data, their users don't
have much alternative.

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cobrophy
While Open Street Maps is an incredible and worthwhile project. The release of
iOS 6 this week has demonstrated just how hard it is to get maps right.

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ghshephard
Kind of like building a world class encyclopedia.

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greenwalls
Ever since the development of the Knight Rider in the 80's the Knight
Foundation has always been a leader in technology. Thanks Michael Knight and
Kit for your continued support of new technologies!

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BoppreH
OpenStreetMap is invaluable for me, a college student in a third world
country:

Google Maps: <http://i.imgur.com/Sqtot.png>

Open Street Maps: <http://i.imgur.com/gZWGL.png>

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DarkEnder0
Brazil is a third world country?

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willrobinson
Credit to Mapquest for opening their data to all and giving OSM a big push
forward.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Google Maps started with public data. Data you
tradtionally could find in public and university libraries and from government
sources, even before the web existed. And then what they found crawling the
web. They saw the potential value and have just added to and improved it a
great deal.

But they did not start from zero. Nor has Apple.

Do not underestmate the "free" contributions to this type of data. It is not
insignificant. It really should be open. In my opinion.

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rmc
Are you sure about that? Outside the USA (which has a nice "lots of government
work is public domain" rule, which lots of countries lack), there is very
little 'freely available' map data from countries. One of the first non-USA
countries on Google Maps, the UK, even now does not have freely available map
data from the government (this is partially why it was people in the UK who
set up OSM)

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willrobinson
I am sure about what I said in my comment, not what you've said in yours. I
said they started with free data. And indeed they started with data on the US,
not the UK. Everyting begins at home. My point is Maps did not start from
zero. Public data got the ball rolling.

I cannot say for sure but I would guess it is also what spurred the ideas to
bring in a guy they knew who was doing related work at Stanford and also to
acquire what became Google Earth. I believe it all began working with public
data. They have obviously added lots of proprietary data since that time. They
have a massive amount of cash to spend. Far more than the libraries and
government agencies in the US who have the public data.

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rmc
Yes they started in USA, but when UK was announced it wasn't a blank map (like
OSM was when it started). The UK maps started with purchased, non-free data.
So in a way, you need to bootstrap it somehow.

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willrobinson
What was the date they started in the UK? How much cash on hand did they have
at that point? A billion or so in the bank maybe?

It all started with public data. Google was born out of a project at Stanford
centered around the idea of "online libraries". They had lots of practice
using public datasets. The crawlable web is itself a public dataset.

Your point about OSM is the reason I mentioned the generosity of MapQuest.

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ballpark
Could anyone explain what the benefit might be to investing in an open source
service like OpenStreetMap? This is a sincere question.

[edit] I know that the concept is brilliant, it's a great service, and has
great potential. Will investors potentially build chargeable products that use
it? Why not just invest more into their product to enhance it?

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tmcw
Companies like MapBox, Stamen, MapQuest, and Bing, who have OSM layers, have
an incentive to improve OSM data because it makes them competitive with
Google; it eliminates the massive fixed/sunk cost of creating proprietary data
and redirects the game into how you can use/distribute/mainstream that data.
The business models for that are fairly clear; charging for services based on
the data.

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ballpark
Makes sense! I didn't realize those companies use OSM. Thanks.

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jenius
They probably saw the 'amazing ios6 maps' blog and were like 'damn, time to
put some money in'

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cpeterso
If the Knight Foundation made this grant last month, they would not get nearly
as much press. Apple's Map mishap is a great PR opportunity to point out our
dependence on walled gardens and promote alternatives.

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interg12
$575k is not a large investment. It's basically angel money.

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waynesutton
Good timing and looking forward to seeing more developers use OSM

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jawr
beautifully crafted website.

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fhars
Except that his backgound image shows no name for the largest city on the map
(Berlin) ;-).

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lttlrck
Michael? Is that you?

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msie
It's all part of a master plan to build K.I.T.T.

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sneak
The singularity, it comes.

