At CartoTowers, we’ve been hard at work preparing some new thematic map visualization options for you to use in CartoDB: Choropleth and Bubble maps. For those of you new to mapping, here’s a quick summary of these two popular cartographic techniques:

Yesterday it was announce that SimpleGeo, now bought by Urban Airship, will stop their operations. They have published a document explaining how to migrate to some alternative services, and they recommend PostGIS as an Open Source solution for their storage option.

This week we wrote a few new examples in the CartoDB Gallery. One of the examples was to show off a feature that allows you to set styles through the URL. Until recently, setting Carto styles in CartoDB required the use of the Developer Console, but now with a bit of new functionality and some sweet new caching, it is possible to set styles through your Maps API URL request. For example,

We, web developers, love JSON, so having a way to use GeoJSON on PostGIS it is kind of a no brainer. Well, thanks to Kashif Rasul, OpenGeo and a bit of financial help from Vizzuality, now we have it available!

In The last 2 weeks a lot of new applications have been developed at #ecohacknyc, #nycbigapps and #sciencehackday using CartoDB, pretty excited. This demonstrates the power of CartoDB specially for fast development of location aware applications and mapping. We are gonna be highlighting different applications that make use of CartoDB on the next days.

Take a sneak peek at some upcoming functionality to CartoDB: Indexed nearest neighbour search. Thanks to CartoDB investment in PostGIS 2.0, you can now find the nearest N things to anywhere on the planet at ultra fast speed!

This has been a crazy week for CartoDB. We presented the platform at last FOSS4G in Denver and since then the response from users had been great.

We often find ourselves needing a simple, high speed and decoupled map tile server to generate maps from PostGIS as fast as possible without sacrificing developmental flexibility.