• Pictures of the event on Flickr
• Summary of the work done, with an animation (before and after)
• Ordizia map in OpenStreetMap

Tagzania Services has also supported OpenStreetMap by sponsoring the State of the Map conference; we’re also talking with our public administrations to liberate their (their?) geo-data. But we can’t be waiting forever, that’s why we’ve started organizing mapping parties. Don’t hate the media, become the media.

These mapping parties goal is making OSM more popular in our area, and, of course, getting some new devote mappers to the project.

This is our mapping party agenda (you can find them also in the OSM wiki current events)

• October 2, Bilbao
• October 3, Andoain
• October 24, Irun
• October 30, Amorebieta-Etxano

We’ve also organized a special mapping party in Ordizia with some high school students by the end of September.

We hope this is just the begining. That’s why we encourage people in our area to contact us for organizing more mapping parties.

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!

There are other things we haven’t shown you, like the Tagzania app for Android we’ll publish soon. Have a look at the demo below:

We’re using OpenStreetMap as data source. You might remember we already use OpenStreetMap data in Tagzania.com thanks to Mapstraction. Tagzania Services is working together with La Personnalite in Mapapel; they’ve designed the printable map so it looks even cooler.

We’ll start soon giving a more appropriate design to the website and adding some new printable maps and locations.

This is our new usability lab:

Hope you like our brand new work place. You can see more photos in our Flickr account.

Describing UkPropertyVision Techcrunch says it’s like “property porn”. Well, there’s some kind of hypnotic effect in those mapvisions: Ajaxian effects moving and changing the info bubbles constantly on the maps, no action required on the part of the user (although in these two examples, the properties to be shown can be narrowed to certain areas and features).

In Spain, besides the Casaszoom example featured in this screenshot below, we also created Betisvision , a social tool for a football (soccer) club that celebrated recently its 100th aniversary.

We were glad to present two applications, one in behalf of one of our customers, and the other one the Beta app of Tagzania itself. Nestoria’s search application to find homes in Spain was the 1st ever application developed in Spanish for Facebook last year, before the social network decided to expand to other languages this year. Last year’s experience with that app made us insights and ideas for other projects, and so the beta Tagzania app was recently launched: so far, only in Spanish, tailored to Spain, and in Beta stage, but it’s there, if you want to check.

Luistxo and Nando from Tagzania Services demoing Nestoria’s app

Other apps in the event were interesting, of course, but most of all we were glad to hear Javier Oliván explaining that the Facebook Platform will expand beyond the limits of its domain. In the near future, it will not only channel third-party applications into the social sphere of Facebook, but it will also be open to be used in other sites and networks. That’s a big step. Just like the opening of the Google Maps API sprouted myriads of geographical mashups, in 2005 there’s a new opportunity here, another defining moment for the Internet as a crossing point of multiple services and data. Tagzania Services doesn’t want to miss the action, certainly.

For that reason, CodeSyntax decided to give its own personality to Tagzania and created a spin-off company that would offer services to other companies. Thus was born Tagzania Services. The new company will take care of the Tagzania.com project, and will work as well for third parties. So far, the projects in which we have been involved are focused on maps, 3D models and Web 2.0 applications. In our Projects section you can get more information. And, of course, you can tune to this blog in which we will report our activity.