Enjoy working with geospatial data

These days we are participating in the Where Conference, in San Francisco. After six months in beta, we presented yesterday the brand new CartoDB 1.0 in a session with a neat title: “How Working With Geospatial Data Can Be A Joy and Not A Pain”. You can download the slides from @jatorre’s presentation here.

We think there’s a lot of room for improvement in all the current tools available to create dynamic maps online. Importing and transforming data is hard. Analyzing data (lots of data!) and taking all the juice out of it is difficult. To put 100 points on a map could be affordable, but it becomes a really difficult task if you are handling 10M points (when it gets really interesting). Commercial tools are not flexible enough.

We designed CartoDB to be the opposite: a user-friendly, open source flexible platform to map, analyze and build location aware apps with data with ease. We want you to enjoy making maps with data (lots of data).

We made a special effort on this when working on v1.0. One of the main improvements of the new site is the new tutorials, examples and documentation addressed to all users, from beginners to advanced data explorers.

At the Where Conference we also talked about other v1.0 improvements, like a 75% rendering speed boost, OpenStreetMaps data import and raster support. @jatorre was this morning at another session on OS Geo Projects where he addressed PostGIS 2.0, already implemented in CartoDB. We will explain all these improvements in detail in further posts.

It was a pleasure to present CartoDB at the Where Conference. We want to thank all the people who attended the presentation, and the organizers who invited us and brought us the great opportunity to present v1.0.