Next week CartoDB will be at Qonnections 2016 as a Silver Sponsor for the first time. Come visit booth #801 to see our demos and learn how CartoDB can enhance your Qlik^® business by providing even more value through location intelligence.

Greetings mobile data mappers! This is a very special post coming to you from the Xamarin Evolve conference in sunny Florida. If you are attending, make sure you visit CartoDB’s booth (#118) and meet me in person!

Now, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming in our mobile series, with an introduction to a non-traditional type of map, indoor maps.

This is going to sound extreme, but without open source software there would be no internet as we know it. That’s right. Everyday we utilize a technology built on collaborative software that only gets better and more powerful the more open and secure it becomes. Each year a conference celebrating the community and collaborative nature of open source tech happens and we couldn’t be more thrilled to take part.

Since the launch of our new Grants for Good Program we have awarded a number of non-profit and environmental organizations with CartoDB Grants. It is with great pleasure that we introduce some of the work being done by social and environmental organizations who make use of CartoDB through the Grants for Good Program.

This year CartoDB will be at the Experience Fighters 2016 — the 3rd annual national meeting of Experience Design and Innovation at the Gran Teatro Principe Pío, here in Madrid, from May 11th to 12th! CartoDB is partnering
with #EXF, alongside with Designit, in order to gather the best creative professionals and UX Designers with new inspiring content that goes beyond their screensavers.

On April 13, Kobe Bryant played his last game of his 20-year career and, in great form, scored 60 points! Fans from Los Angeles, and the world over, were saddened to see the Black Mamba go, but his shooting record will live on in history, and now as a visualization. The LA Times mapped all of Kobe’s career shots using CartoDB and Python. The NBA data-driven visualization, charts every shot ever taken by Kobe - roughly 30,699 (data) points. How many points did he score in his lifetime? For those of you keeping count: 33,643 points.

So how exactly did the LA Times do it?

Disaster requires quick action!

Maps are an incredibly powerful tool for humanitarian crisis response. One of the most compelling phenomena in recent times has emerged from global communi ties committed to solving some of the many challenges that arise from timely humanitarian response. Ground-breaking initiatives such as OpenStreetMap have reframed the ways in which we collectively generate spatial data. Even more importantly, organizations such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team are taking this culture of mapping to new heights by activating global communities to create previously impossible amounts of data for use in crisis and humanitarian response efforts.

Every day large volumes of location data are generated by social networks, remote sensing, and mobile devices. For quite some time, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been used as the standard tool to manage and analyze this type of geo-referenced data. However, GIS tools have always been oriented towards professionals in geomatics than to the general public, creating a barrier to real insights and data analysis.

Have you ever shared a location in WhatsApp? That list of close-by places comes from a geocoding service. When you request a car service, like Didi, the route that the drivers take comes from a routing service. Have you ordered a pizza in Seamless? The maps that show you where the restaurant is located is a basemap service. We call all those services Location Data Services and you are using them all the time.

Welcome to the next post on mobile development at CartoDB. We have great news today. CartoDB is a proud sponsor of Xamarin Evolve — the largest gathering of Xamarin developers and others around the ecosystem! Xamarin Evolve will take place in Orlando, FL from April 24-28. We’d love you to join us at the CartoDB booth (#118)! If you are attending, contact us to meet me and some of my colleagues from CartoDB in person!