As many know, CartoDB’s commitment to elevating efforts in conservation, climate change, and the environment has shaped our practice and given way to many exciting mapping projects such as the creative and impressive Carbon Calculator and the Global Forest Watch Map that allows users to monitor deforestation in real time.

On Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union Address. This year marks the first year that the State of the Union address was made available as full text for perusal and commentary prior to the speech. In the spirit of this openness, we’ve paired a few pull quotes with some awesome maps from our community. This will kickstart a series of blogs wherein we’ll feature 5+ community maps based on a concept or theme.

Skim the speech text here, and follow along below to check out the State of the Union as measured in maps!

A common challenge we see facing our users is how to create dynamic maps with secure data. We have always had the ability to securely publish interactive maps from private data on CartoDB. Today, we go a step further. With the new Named Maps API, users can create dynamic maps, capable of being filtered and modified in front-end applications while maintaining the security of the data used to render those maps.

We have created a CartoDB on Google Platform product product. If you are looking for a Maps Engine replacement, please review our new offering. You can also find an explanation of features and benefits of CartoDB, and information about migrating your existing projects.

We are excited to introduce Eva Cabanach who returns to Madrid from London to join the CartoDB team! Eva will be helping grow our community of users through dedicated outreach.

Allow us to introduce the newest addition to our growing collection of cartographers, Michelle Chandra! She’s just joined our NY office where she specializes in showing CartoDB love to our global community.

We’re pleased to welcome Francisco Dans to the CartoDB team! He’ll be animating bubbles everywhere with Torque.js.

Today we are excited to bring you a guest post from our friends at KimonoLabs. If you aren’t familiar with Kimono, they bring a set of tools that enable you to create APIs from data and information scattered throughout the Web. We highly recommend checking them out. Below, they will share with you the steps for turning a website into an API and then how to use CartoDB to map that API in some really interesting ways. This was posted originally over on Kimono’s blog here, thanks for the permission to repost!