State of the Map 2009 is over. Congratulations to the OSMF for organizing such an event with good speakers. It has been a pleasure for us sponsoring this year’s SOTM09.

There were many interesting talks, I’ve chosen my favourite ones for the Video nominations.

  • Making Money with OSM – Frederik Ramm (Geofabrik): OpenStreetMap needs companies around it earning money, that will get the project more powerful for competing with other maps.
  • How People Search for Locations – Ed Freyfogle (Nestoria): it was an interesting approach from the users’ points of view. OSM must think more in the map users (not just mappers).
  • Open Paper Maps – Mike Migurski (Stamen). Walking Papers is a nice project for helping mappers to improve OSM data.
  • Free and Open Palestine – Mikel Maron. Mikel and his collegues have done a brilliant work mapping Palestine. Hope he goes on doing it in other countries.

“State of …” talks were also interesting, specially Egypt, Cuba and Japan.

  • Egypt: It’s amazing seeing how their map has changed in just one year with just a few volunteers.
  • Cuba: How can they map without GPS devices or good satellite images?
  • Japan: He was a funny guy. He walked about 24 km for mapping a shrine!

We’re really positive about our first SOTM, our talk in the Geomob session (thanks to Christopher Osborne!) and the sponsoring (it was nice seeing the Tagzania logo near Cloudmade’s or Ito’s). We got some interesting feedback about Mapapel and we’ll keep on working on it improving the website and adding some new city maps. We’re also thinking about how can we improve OpenStreetMaps presence in Tagzania.com

See you next year!