Subject
7 entries
Geospatial
Bookmarks
Mapbox Series B: Building the Whole Mapping Stack
Mapbox's 2015 Series B announcement — $52.55M to build the full mapping stack from vector tiles to SDK. At the time Mapbox was the most serious challenger to Google Maps for developers who wanted control over map styling and data.
Strava Global Heatmap
Strava's global heatmap aggregates GPS tracks from millions of runs and rides to show where athletes move around the world — a stunning geographic visualization that also accidentally revealed military base locations. Privacy implications aside, technically a landmark crowdsourced geospatial visualization.
Around the World — CartoDB Map of Zipfian Applicants
A CartoDB map showing the global geographic distribution of Zipfian Academy applicants — a data visualization made by a Zipfian student demonstrating where the data science bootcamp was drawing interest from worldwide.
The Rise of OpenStreetMap
The Next Web's 2014 profile of OpenStreetMap's rise as a challenger to Google Maps — covering how volunteer-driven mapping achieved coverage quality sufficient for Foursquare, Apple, and Mapbox to rely on it. A case study in open data displacing a proprietary incumbent.
Yelp Hipster Finder (SF Word Map)
Yelp's word map feature visualizing geographic density of the word 'hipster' in SF business reviews. A small data visualization curiosity that mapped subcultural geography through review language.
Twitter Visualizes Billions of Tweets in Interactive 3D Maps
The Verge's coverage of Twitter's interactive 3D tweet visualization showing billions of geotagged tweets rendered as a globe. An early example of browser-based 3D data visualization at social media scale using WebGL.
Let's Make a Map
Mike Bostock's tutorial on building geographic maps with D3.js and TopoJSON — from raw Natural Earth shapefiles to rendered SVG maps. The canonical reference for browser-based cartography in 2013.