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Category: CartoSoft

Mapdango mashes Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, Wikipedia, and more into your maps

Rick Turoczy on September 3, 2008

While mapping services are often one of the first places people start mucking with APIs and mashups, few take to it as well as Portland-based Cartosoft. Continuing to push the mapping mashup envelope, they’ve just announced the latest version of their award-winning flagship product, Mapdango.

Mapdango

From the Mapdango v2 post:

You spoke, emailed, and clicked – and we listened. After some relatively in-depth analysis for usage trends over the last four months or so, we custom-tailored mapdango to provide users with a better experience exploring different locations around the world.

So what’s new?

Well, what’s most important to a mashup? More stuff to mashup, of course. And Mapdango doesn’t disappoint. If it’s got an API available and some GIS info, it’s likely that it’s on Mapdango, now.

The Google Maps based tool now includes travel books from Amazon, news from Google News, weather from WeatherBug, photos from Panoramio, videos from YouTube, articles from Wikipedia, country demographic information from the US Census Bureau, geotagged Flickr photos, events from Eventful, social connections via Google Friend Connect (Mapdango was one of the early beta testers of the Friend Connect service), related news from Digg, links from FriendFeed, and “a whole bunch” of social bookmarking links.

To make things a little easier to digest, the single view map has now been split into three separate views: a dashboard, a map view, and a social view.

What’s more, they’ve added the ability to string queries through a URL, making it easier to bookmark and perform quick lookups:

We have made it even easier to add dynamic location links to mapdango. Simply add a URL-escaped location to the following URL, and mapdango will search for a location: http://www.mapdango.com/location.php?q=. For example, to search for Portland, Oregon, you would create a link to http://www.mapdango.com/location.php?q=Portland+Oregon.

All in all, this feature-rich release marks another leap forward for Mapdango and Cartosoft. And it serves as a positive reminder to the industry that—with the continued proclivity toward open data exchange—individuals hold the power to accumulate and manage tons of data within a single resource.

To try it for yourself, visit Mapdango. For more on the latest release, see the Mapdango v2 release post on the Cartosoft blog.

Mapdango tops Mashup Camp charts

Rick Turoczy on March 25, 2008

Mapdango, a slick mapping mashup from Portland-based CartoSoft that has always impressed me, has now impressed a whole heck of a lot more people—including some folks down in Mountain View, CA—by winning the Best Mashup at Mashup Camp.

According to Andres Ferrate, CartoSoft’s Head Honcho and the development power behind Mapdango [Editor: Emphasis is mine]:

There were some great mashups in the contest, including several location-based product availability mashups, some mobile mashups (very cool to think about the emerging possibilities of mashing stuff around for devices), iMovie mashups, a Flickr history mashup, and more. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to see all of the mashups that were competing. Nice to think the little mashup from Portland gave those Silicon Valley mashups a run for the bling bling.

For more on Mapdango and other geospatial magic, visit CartoSoft.

Showdango: Find and promote Webinars

Rick Turoczy on March 6, 2008

I like Webinars, Webcasts, and online presentations as much as the next guy, but it’s rare that I attend one without having randomly stumbled upon the opportunity.Well, all that may change with Showdango, a Portland-based startup that aims to be your source for finding Webinars.

Showdango’s community-driven Webinar index also provides RSS feeds and the ability to automagically add an event to Google Calendar and/or iCal (the GCal and iCal links are included in the RSS feeds to boot).How did Showdango come about?

It all began with a webinar that we attended by Seth Godin. We were so inspired by Seth’s webinar that we decided to look for other webinars, and that is when, regretfully, we found out that there weren’t any good resources for webinars… until now. showdango is the world’s first webinar index, and our vision is to provide a valuable resource that anyone can use to share, view, and track webinars. We hope that you will help us spread the word about showdango.

Showdango was build by CartoSoft, a small geospatial startup based out of Portland, Oregon. The company’s mission is to extend the reach of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to a broader audience through the use of Internet Mapping Solutions.For more information, see the Showdango post on the CartoSoft blog. Or to try it for yourself, visit Showdango.