Property values are a persistent obsession for New Yorkers, as are the arbitrary constraints to dwelling well (dwelling? yes). Between navigating the rental quagmire of online listings to toggling the various Trulia, StreetEasy, and Zillow helper services, you can tumble down a rabbit hole of the worst options imaginable (or at least, publishable). In the bizzare world of renting, we can help you through the looking glass.

This Map of the Week features the work of a familiar face to CartoDB, Chris Henrick, who between juggling GIS projects and grad school also co-organizes Maptime NYC. His MFA thesis project “Am I Rent Stabilized?” combines code, maps, and critical thinking about urban planning and renters rights - all of which we love and welcome at CartoDB! He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, where we locals join him in an obsession with rent rates and regulations. Read on to discover more of the mechanics behind his impressive web app!

Supporting our mapping communities around the world is a big slice of what CartoDB is all about. We feel that it’s our fellow mappers and GIS communities that have helped shape what CartoDB is today. This is why a few months back CartoDB had the pleasure of buying pizza for a world of mappers for our March of Maptime! The pizza was a hit, and we had a blast, so we asked ourselves: “Why stop there?”.

A short week after our conference celebrating news and maps, and a short month away from State of the Map, we wanted to write and wrap up some of the awesome of GeoJourNews. On May 15th (that is 5/15/15, the best of palindrome days!) we convened over 150 geographers, researchers and mappers to give keynotes and lightning talks on the topic of news maps. We featured 16 speakers, from a few countries and a varied program of newsrooms, attracting the communities of our planning partners at Parson’s Journalism + Design program and Knight Mozilla Open News. We learned, mapped, and built together a program of impressive talks and projects! Read on to learn more!

The EuroBirdPortal project is launching on June 5th in support of Europe’s Green Week 2015. The EBP project tackles the important task of ornithological research and conservation by developing a viewer that tracks various bird distributional patterns built with CartoDB.

What would it look like to literally map the world’s news as it happens? What if you could reach across a growing fraction of the world’s news media every day, in real time, in 65 languages, and put a dot on a map for every mention in every article, in every language of any location on earth, along with the people, organizations, topics, and emotions associated with each place? That’s the vision that drives the GDELT Project.

In the wake of our GeoJourNews conference, celebrating journalists, cartographers and coders, we have an exciting partnership to announce with GDELT, one that we hope will only further support our community! We welcome Kalev H. Leetaru, a Senior Fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security in Washington DC, to author a guest post demoing how CartoDB can be used to map the world’s news in real time!

This past Sunday was election time again in Spain. Every four years people head to the polls for a regional and municipal election that often foreshadows what is to come in the national election held later in the year. Nowadays these events are considered much more than mere voting—they’re true milestones in the story of a nation and generate huge amounts of data powered by media outlets and social media networks.

Against this backdrop maps are not only a way to show voting results, political differences between regions, and possible political coalitions, but also a dynamic & interactive tool to visualize and analyze poll predictions and real-time results. We’re proud to have been chosen by some of the most important Spanish media outlets to create election coverage maps, and are excited to share them with you. Please keep reading to explore the different projects we were working on over the weekend, and to see the evolution of the Spain’s political map!

Great news for everyone in the US Federal Government who loves maps! CartoDB has agreed with the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency responsible for coordinating procurement across all federal agencies, to a set of “federal friendly” Terms of Use for Federal government users. You might say we’re as wholesome as apple pie.

We’re excited to introduce our latest addition to our Madrid team, Jorge Sanz! Jorge is based on our Madrid office and will be helping CartoDB users on complex projects as solution architect.

CartoDB is open by definition, so it’s about time we let you in on which one of the public maps you made is the most popular one at the moment. As you may be aware of, we at CartoDB love to challenge ourselves and experiment with different ideas that may end up leading to new endeavours. That’s what we do every Friday afternoon in our leapfrog sessions: team up to work on cool projects that aren’t part of our day-to-day tasks.

In one of this sessions a group of us came up with the idea of showing off the most-visited CartoDB map in an accessible and user-friendly way. That’s how the TrendMap idea was born and developed, and now we want to share it with everyone! If you’ve you ever wondered which CartoDB map is the most popular in real time, the TrendMap application is perfect for you.

CartoDB has an excellent and easy-to-use synced tables feature, that reads data from a public URL on a regular schedule and keeps an associated CartoDB table up-to-date. However, synced tables require the data to be publicly available so CartoDB can read it, and that the destination table get over-written at each update.