As you’ve seen from the amount of mapping posts on this blog, we’re ramping up our investment in MapBox - our open source mapping tools backed by a cloud platform for sharing and embedding custom maps and beautiful worldwide maps. To capture this momentum and communicate about MapBox news, we just launched the MapBox Blog over at MapBox.com. Follow us there or via RSS and Twitter.

Moving forward, all MapBox news will be posted on MapBox.com instead of here. So if you’re following us on Twitter @developmentseed, now would be a good time to follow @mapbox too. Of course we will continue posting here on DevelopmentSeed.org/blog about our data visualization and open data strategy projects, Node.js development, and local technology events.

There are several interesting events happening this week in Washington, DC, from strategically using open data to improve response to climate change to mapping traditionally undocumented areas and slums to talking real-time data at Tech@State. See our roundup below for the events we’re hoping to attend this month, and find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, January 31

Noon to 1:30 pm

World Bank Climate Data Briefing: On the heels of opening up of a large climate dataset, the World Bank is hosting this discussion on how open data can help respond to climate change. This meeting is specifically focused on developers working with data and data visualizations, and climate change experts. Alex and Eric will be there to talk about the benefits of open data and how to release it in usable ways.

Wednesday, February 1

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetup: This month’s meetup will look at mapping slums and other un ddocumented areas, with speakers presenting on the techniques they’ve successfully used to map areas in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, East Jerusalem, Cite Soleil, and more. Really looking forward to this one.

Thursday, February 2

7:00 - 9:00 pm

CocoaHeads Meetup: This meetup will feature two presentations from Apple developers and give you a chance to meet and talk with local developers building on the platform.

Friday, February 3

8:00 am - 5:00 pm

Tech@State: Real-Time Awareness: Access to real-time data and the ability to quickly process and analyze can tremendously help when responding to disasters and breaking events. Tech@State will look at how to deliver real-time data and use it effectively. Alex and I will be here, specifically interesting in talking about data visualizations.

Saturday, February 4

8:30 am - 4:00 pm

Tech@State Unconference: Following Friday’s event, this will be a hands on dive into using technology to help collect, filter, analyze, and visualize real-time data. Check it out if you want to work with some real data and code.

Interested in learning about Python, meeting other people behind tech startups, or just working into the night with friends? Check out our roundup of technology events in Washington, DC this week, and check out that full event calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Monday, January 21

8:45 pm

DC Nightowls Co-Working Group: Interested in brainstorming, bouncing ideas, hacking, or just working late night? Check out this meetup to get some work done and meet other productive people.

Tuesday, January 22

6:30 pm

DC Lean Startup Circle Meetup: Folks from local startups like UmbaBox, mphoria, and HelloWallet will talk about their strategies for reaching out to new customers and keeping them on board at this meetup.

7:00 pm

DC jQuery Meetup: This month the DC jQuery group is teaming up with the Selenium meetup to talk about testing suites like Jasmine and others.

Thursday, January 26

6:30 pm

Refresh DC: Want to learn more about what services are offered in the cloud, and what all the hype is about? Check out this month’s meetup for an introduction.

Saturday, January 28

11:00 am - 2:00 pm

Python Web Scraping 101 for Journalists: The good folks at the Sunlight Foundation are hosting this hacking how to, introducing the fundamentals of Python using a simple web scraping example. If you’ve been wanting to dive in or hone up on Python, you’ll want to check this out.

We just launched MapBox.com/switch, a walk-through showing how MapBox is much more than just a mapping API. Particularly when combined with open source libraries like Leaflet, MapBox provides an incredibly powerful alternative to big traditional providers. The goal of /switch is to show how you can get up and running with an open mapping stack supported by a scalable cloud infrastructure.

In addition to featuring the open source wins of the MapBox Platform, the campaign also highlights some price comparisons. Specifically we’re looking at Google Map’s new price increase for high-end users, which for many businesses that depend on maps, are potentially debilitating. While we continue to look at Google Maps as a powerful integration point for MapBox, and something we continue to support for layering under custom maps, some organizations need to exit Google maps all together to save resources and are looking for viable alternatives. With MapBox, you have options.

To be clear, though, we are not trying to make a one-to-one comparison. MapBox doesn’t have its own satellites orbiting or cars roaming cities. We are not in the business of managing routing information to provide driving directions nor do we currently have the geocoding infrastructure that Google does. But we are in the business of making fast and beautiful maps, and for many organizations incredible base maps at a fair and flexible price makes MapBox a real alternative to Google Maps. Check out our new custom OpenStreetMap base maps that we’re launching later this month.

Read more about how to switch to MapBox and reach out to us if you want to talk about custom pricing packages or longer term contracts.

GDAL, the library underlying nearly all major open source geospatial projects (it’s used in apps like QGIS, ArcGIS, and Google Earth), has gained MBTiles read support. This adds a big name to the list of MBTiles supporting implementations because GDAL shines at data exploration and format conversion. It means MBTiles will be easier to use from any application that uses GDAL, and the list is impressively long. Once GDAL 2.0 is released, this potentially means you’ll be able to open MBTiles files directly in applications like QGIS. But already with GDAL trunk you can do fancy things like:

Query remote mbtiles for their metadata:

$ gdalinfo /vsicurl/http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.geography-class.mbtiles | grep description One of the example maps that comes with [TileMill](http://mapbox.com/tilemill/) - a bright and colorful world map that blends retro and high-tech with its folded paper texture and interactive flag tooltips.

Or turn Konstantin’s gorgeous Iceland Map into a single 1.5 GB image suitable for high resolution printing:

$ wget http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/kkaefer.iceland.mbtiles $ gdal_translate kkaefer.iceland.mbtiles iceland.tiff Input file size is 16384, 16384 0...10...20...30...40...50...60...70...80...90...100 - done. $ ls -lh *tiff -rw-r--r-- 1 dane staff 1.0G Jan 8 18:12 iceland.tiff

Or even remotely lookup a temperature anomaly value for a given coordinate in the World Bank Climate Scenario A2 Map:

$ gdallocationinfo /vsicurl/http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/worldbank-climate.wbc-temp-anom-a2.mbtiles -wgs84 2 49 -b 1 Report: Location: (5279P,11525L) Band 1: 11549{"control_vals":"-1.90,-1.08,1.09,3.90,8.48,12.43,15.96,15.42,11.18,6.04,1.80,-1.11,-1.90","id":11549,"p10_vals":"-1.58,-0.09,1.85,4.70,8.60,13.81,17.82,17.62,13.58,6.83,2.19,-0.38,-1.58","p10_yr_anom":3,"p50_vals":"1.17,1.85,3.71,6.75,11.32,16.57,21.35,21.34,16.14,10.01,5.37,1.88,1.17","p90_vals":"4.28,5.05,6.68,9.34,13.67,19.06,24.62,25.00,19.31,12.18,7.59,5.43,4.28","p90_yr_anom":4.7} Value: 255

More details about GDAL’s MBTiles support are on its docs page.

This is brilliant. I noticed the addition two weeks ago in #gdal IRC and quickly realized it was Even Rouault (profile/blog) at work. He’s a true force of nature - an amazingly smart and focused developer and one of the lead maintainers of the GDAL project. This is a very key position now that the lead and founder of the project Frank Warmerdam has been hired by Google and his commits have understandably declined. In addition to helping maintain a huge project, Even seems insanely deft at adding new drivers overnight to the delight of programmers the world over.

So, thanks for this awesome feature Even, and thanks Frank and others for creating such a powerful library for developers like Even to build on. We notice :)

Over lunch on January 31, the World Bank is holding a meeting with developers and data and climate change experts to discuss how open data can help address some of the challenges of climate change. Eric and I will be there to talk open data best practices and specifically on our experience mapping open data for the World Bank and the Global Adaptation Institute.

This meeting comes on the heels of the COP 17/CMP 7 Climate Change Conference in Durban two months ago, where the World Bank released a series of climate data sets to improve climate and development decision-making. Now that this climate data is available to a broader audience, the World Bank is bringing together an overlapping community of development practitioners, climate change experts, and programmers to further explore how to use open data to improve decision making, planning, and communications. This meeting takes place in addition to the World Bank’s efforts to get a larger audience using its data through the ongoing Apps for Climate Challenge.

Eric and I are looking forward to discuss using open data with an eye toward visualizing it, specifically by creating compelling map-based visualizations like the climate change maps on climate4development.developmentseed.org. We’ll also show how easy it is to add more data to existing maps like this through overlays, to tell new and different stories with your data.

You can find more information about the event on the World Bank’s site, and rsvp to attend the event in person or online.

Projected temperature changes by the year 2100 according to one scenario.

Artem Pavlenko, the creator of Mapnik - the amazing map renderer at the heart of many open source mapping tools ranging from our map design studio TileMill to huge live updating datasets like OpenStreetMap - has joined the MapBox team. He comes on board after playing a critical role in the launch of MapQuest Open, which is based on open source Mapnik and OpenStreetMap data.

Artem is a incredible addition as we further grow the MapBox platform this year. Most recently he has been working with Dane porting TileMill to Windows.

Artem will continue to lead Mapnik’s core development - in fact his main work right now is focused on developing for Mapnik 3. All of this work will result in huge performance improvements for us, which will be critical as we build out our world base maps and further scale our platform. After years of coordinating together in the open source space, it is amazing to get to work together on the same team.