Mapbox

Mapbox
Private
Industry maps
Founded 2010 (2010)
Headquarters Washington, DC
San Francisco, CA, United States
Key people
 Eric Gundersen Tom MacWright
Number of employees
 180[1]
Website mapbox.com

Mapbox is a large provider of custom online maps for websites such as Foursquare, Pinterest, Evernote, the Financial Times, The Weather Channel and Uber Technologies.[2] Since 2010, it has rapidly expanded the niche of custom maps, as a response to the limited choice offered by map providers such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.[2] Mapbox is the creator of, or a significant contributor to some open source mapping libraries and applications, including the MBTiles specification, the TileMill cartography IDE, the Leaflet JavaScript library, and the CartoCSS map styling language and parser.

Data sources and technology

The data are taken both from open data sources, such as OpenStreetMap and NASA, and from proprietary data sources, such as DigitalGlobe.[3][4] The technology is based on Node.js,[5] CouchDB, Mapnik, GDAL, and Leafletjs.

Mapbox uses data from tracks of its clients' users, such as Strava and RunKeeper, to identify likely missing data in OpenStreetMap with automatic methods, then manually applies the fixes or reports the issue to OSM contributors.[6][7]

History

The startup[2] was created as a part of Development Seed in order to offer map customization for non-profit customers, in 2010. It was bootstrapped until a 2013 $10M funding round by Foundry Group.[8] In June 2015, Mapbox announced it had raised $52.55 million in a Series B round of funding.[9]

Early work on OpenStreetMap tools, including the iD editor, was funded by a $575,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.[10]

On 2016-07-11, MapQuest discontinued the open tile API[11] and users such as GNOME Maps were switched to a temporarily free tier of the Mapbox tileserver,[12] while considering alternatives.[13]

References

  1. ↑ "Our Team". Mapbox. Retrieved 9 July 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 The New Cartographers, Washington Post, 22 July 2013
  3. ↑ A Cloudless Atlas — How Mapbox Aims to Make the World’s ‘Most Beautiful Map’, Wired, 14 May 2013
  4. ↑ "Map Data: Stick a Pin in It". The Economist. 4 April 2013. Retrieved 3 December 2013.
  5. ↑ Nugent, Dave. "Node.js Future & Drupal". Retrieved 3 December 2013.
  6. ↑ https://www.mapbox.com/blog/updating-map-runkeeper/
  7. ↑ https://github.com/mapbox/mapping/wiki
  8. ↑ Lomas, Natasha. "Mapbox Closes $10M Series A From Foundry Group To Build The Future Of Interactive, Mobile Maps". TechCrunch. Retrieved 3 December 2013.
  9. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid. "Mapbox Raises $52.6M Led By DFJ To Be The "Map Layer" For All Apps". Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  10. ↑ Franzen, Carl. "Mapbox Aims For Open Source, Digital Map Revolution". Talking Points Memo. Retrieved 3 December 2013.
  11. ↑ "GNOME Maps and the tile problem". 2016-07-27.
  12. ↑ Mattias Bengtsson. "Tiles and Mapbox".
  13. ↑ https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764841

See also


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