While many CartoDB users arrive to the service with data on hand others look to use CartoDB to host and map data from ongoing collection. For those users, we offer a number of useful client libraries and tutorials for using our APIs. For businesses, scientists, and students that still want a little easier way to collect data, we thought we would put together this tutorial covering how to collect data with Google Forms and have it inserted directly into a CartoDB table.

We have been discussing a lot lately how we can summarize CartoDB in a short and sweet sentence. A lot of adjectives have been tested. One of the options we have liked the most is, CartoDB allows you to render your data on a map. As simple as the phrase sounds, it packs a lot of meaning. Let us explain”

Even though our blog gives a lot of attention to maps, CartoDB is a great tool for a lot more than just maps. We have seen in the past how the CartoDB APIs can do all sorts of dynamic queries to CartoDB hosted data. While dynamic queries CartoDB can be geospatial in nature, even returning GeoJSON formatted results, we haven’t spent much time highlighting the fact that they don’t have to be geospatial. That is why we are excited by the latest project released by the Climate Policy Initiative, the Policy Climate Interactive.

Today we here from Chong Zi Xin and a team of hackers that took part in the recent, Urban Data Challenge. The team reached out a few months ago about using CartoDB for their challenge entry and the other day we found that their entry had won 3rd place. We were really impressed with some of the maps they produced, including perspective views with integrated bar charts (wow!).

As some of you may already know, Newsweek / The Daily Beast has been using CartoDB for some time now, and as such today’s blog post comes from Michael Keller of Newsbeast labs. We’d also like to take the opportunity thank Michael for his amazing contributions to the CartoDB community. Thanks!

Over the past months you have probably come to realize, we love data that moves. Moving data can make your maps and visualizations really come to life and data you can use to build these visualizations can come in a lot of forms. Whether it’s data that crawls and zips across a map through time, data that bursts and comes to life as you watch, or data that changes form or intensity, it all can lead not to some really amazing visualizations.

We often find ourselves exploring what interesting things can be found in data that changes through time. In recent blog posts about the Mobile World Congress (MWC), we have published a couple interesting experiments with temporal data. In the first, we showed how CartoDB could be used to map traffic in Barcelona.