Today we have a guest blogpost up on the OKCon blog about telling stories with open data. The post talks a bit about our recent work with the PLUTO data. We wrote the post to both talk about our interest in open data and to let people know about our workshop at this year’s OKCon event in mid-September.

In this guest blog, Tim Robertson describes how the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) are building a dynamic density map with 0.5 billion tiles and supporting 40,000 tile updates per second using components of the CartoDB stack for their forthcoming portal. This is the first time the CartoDB stack is connected to an HBase / Hadoop backend to handle large data volumes and velocities. It is a great example on the upcoming configurations we will see of CartoDB connected to Big Data sources.

We have a couple of public presentations coming up that we wanted to let you know about. They are both in the NYC area, but don’t worry, we have OKCon, FOSS4G, NACIS, and Strata London all coming up in other places!

We are happy to be sponsors again for next month’s FOSS4G conference in Nottingham. These is one of our favorite meetings, where many of the people we look up to come together to talk about mapping and geospatial technologies. We’d love to see you there, hopefully we’ll even have some t-shirts to give out. Three of our team members will be coming, Javier de la Torre, Sandro Santilli, and Chris Holmes, so grab any of them to chat CartoDB.

Sorry, that title was too fun not to use. In reality, we aren’t talking about the rejected non-planet, we are talking about NYC’s latest open data release, the PLUTO dataset. The PLUTO dataset contains land use and geographic data for tax lots across the five boroughs. That’s 850,000 polygons! While not being exactly building-by-building footprints, tax lots are now among the highest resolution geospatial data available from the NYC open data portal.

We have designed CartoDB from day one to be an entirely cloud based solution for your mapping and data visualization needs. This gives us tremendous flexibility in the ways we can bring you speed, new features, and a better service all around. We take a lot of inspiration from other cloud services like Dropbox, the tool that has changed the way many of us share, store and organize our files. With nearly 200 million users worldwide, Dropbox services 700,000 file uploads every minute!

Almost since the first release of CartoDB a couple years back, we have regularly received requests for easier legends in embedded and shared maps. We understand fully where these people were coming from, heck, we wanted legends pretty badly ourselves. For a lot of the time in between, we have focused our small team on bringing you faster maps, easier visualizations, and improved publishing tools. So,we take it as a sign of just how far CartoDB has come that we finally integrated legends into the user-interface.

Today we are pleased to publish a post from Greg More, founder of OOM Creative. We saw some of the maps being created by Greg and his team for the City of Melbourne and knew our users would be interested in the project and process. Enjoy!