30 ms·

Mapzen Shutdown

398 points by morisy 9y ago

yosamino 9y ago
> we’re optimistic about what’s next. Well... what's next for me is rewriting this application in the next 30 days. Not feeling too "optimistic" there about that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aw3c2 9y ago
  Which API(s) do you rely on? Are you sure that self-hosting them is not an option?
  - freyfogle 9y ago
    I can't speak for the commenter above, but as someone who runs a paid service built on open geodata I can tell you our best customers are those who first try to self host and then realize what a pain that is. The challenge is not just keeping the software up to date, but that you also need to keep the data fresh. How fresh of course depends on your exact use case, of course, but for perspective OpenStreetMap has 3-4 million edits per day. It's totally doable - and is technically very interesting, but in much the same way that fixing your own car or baking your own bread is doable and fun. It's more cost-effective to hand it off to a reliable expert. Building/installing is (relatively) easy. Maintaining is hard.
    - MattBlissett 9y ago
      Even without a requirement to stay particularly up to date, the size of the datasets makes working with OpenStreetMap reasonably complicated. I needed tiles in non-web-standard projections: equirectangular and polar (EPSG:4326, 3575 and 3031). ESRI used to provide equirectangular tiles[0], but have deprecated the service. Polarmap have an Arctic map, but only at standard resolution [1]. I couldn't find an Antarctic map. With a fair amount of fiddling, and building on the work OpenMapTiles.org have done, it was possible to generate the tiles, but I now realise why few people have attempted this: it requires a lot of processing power, technical ability to get everything working properly, and cartography to have a map that looks good (not just the final styling, but the choice of what data is present in each layer of vector tiles). I met the minimum of what we needed [2], but I need to find more time to do the rest -- like contours. [0] http://server.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/ESRI_StreetMap_World_2D/MapServer?f=jsapi http://server.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/ESRI_Str... [1] https://webmap.arcticconnect.org/polarmap.js/examples/PolarMap/quick-start/ https://webmap.arcticconnect.org/polarmap.js/examples/PolarM... [2a] Small demo: https://api.gbif.org/v2/map/demo7.html https://api.gbif.org/v2/map/demo7.html (shows northern fulmar seabirds) [2b] An overview of the tiles: https://tile.gbif.org/ui/ https://tile.gbif.org/ui/ [2c] In production https://www.gbif.org/species/2481433 https://www.gbif.org/species/2481433 (click to change the projection)
  - gopi_ar 9y ago
    We did a study on self-hosting vs saas for geocoding. Here it is: https://view.attach.io/ryiFAKzmb https://view.attach.io/ryiFAKzmb It's a bit marketing-y though :-) Disclosure: we host an OSM compatible geocoder at https://locationiq.org https://locationiq.org
- johansch 9y ago
  They are optimistic about getting paid next month.
- freyfogle 9y ago
  Do you need geocoding? I ask because I am one of the makers of the OpenCage geocoder. We offer forward and reverse geocoding from open data (primarily OpenStreetMap, but also others). We're listed in the migration guide, and we'll be offering 20% off our pricing for all former Mapzen customers. Blog post about that is coming shortly. I hope we can help you. https://geocoder.opencagedata.com https://geocoder.opencagedata.com Edit: here's the post about the 20% lifetime discount for former Mapzen customers: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/mapzen https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/mapzen
  - aw3c2 9y ago
    Is your code free and open-source?
    - freyfogle 9y ago
      Our code is not, that said it is "just" a very thin layer to various opensource and open data geocoders. See: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits
      - aw3c2 9y ago
        Oh nice!
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    I'm sorry, but the last time I tried OpenCage it was terrible. And by terrible, I mean in line with everything else that uses OSM-based data. Geocoding is hard and I wish you luck, but you've got a long way to go.
    - heurist 9y ago
      I've never come across a geocoder better or cheaper than Google, unfortunately. They all claim accuracy but fail in trivial cases, or interpolate to the wrong part of the street where Google is spot on (though Google has its occasional flaws). I'd love to see competition but it's probably not coming any time soon.
- gopi_ar 9y ago
  We're putting up a mapzen / pelias compatible endpoint soon on our geocoding service. https://locationiq.org https://locationiq.org It's OSM compatible at the moment.
LeonM 9y ago
Why are they shutting down?
- daenney 9y ago
  I'm going to guess: not enough customers to get them to a point where the business is sustainable and not being able to find inverstors that are willing to invest in something like this. They have a very nice product but competing with the likes of Google is hard.
  - glennon 9y ago
    Mapzen was part of Samsung.
    - daenney 9y ago
      Ha, I did not know that. I knew it came out of the Samsung accelerator, didn't know they were actually owned by Samsung. My guess is probably wrong in that case. However, from all that I can find it states they're supported by Samsung Research, to me that's not the same thing as 'part of' Samsung, which would imply ownership.
      - pc86 9y ago
        > However, from all that I can find it states they're supported by Samsung Research, to me that's not the same thing as 'part of' Samsung, which would imply ownership. You are correct. They are not owned by Samsung, they were simply part of the accelerator.
        djsumdog 9y ago
        I could see how this would be a critical concept for Samsung, as it may need to position itself one day to be separate from the Google ecosystem.
        devalisher 9y ago
NelsonMinar 9y ago
Oh I'm so sad for them. Mapzen has a bunch of really great products and services, they are some of the top experts in open source mapping. It's a shame the business hasn't worked out. They have a good companion post on alternative services for folks needing to migrate. It doubles as a survey of the best in open source mapping tools out there right now. https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ Edit also a post specific to the Who's On First project: https://www.whosonfirst.org/blog/2018/01/02/chapter-two/ https://www.whosonfirst.org/blog/2018/01/02/chapter-two/
- brightball 9y ago
  Great to know. I’d been thinking about setting up these tools just to tinker anyway.
- bsder 9y ago
  > They have a good companion post on alternative services for folks needing to migrate. It doubles as a survey of the best in open source mapping tools out there right now. https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ That post needs to be archived somewhere before the shutdown.
  - queeerkopf 9y ago
    They took care of that themselves: https://medium.com/postzen/mapzen-alternatives-aa6d857e3532 https://medium.com/postzen/mapzen-alternatives-aa6d857e3532 It's not as nicely formatted though. The Internet Archive has it too and it's closer to the original: http://web.archive.org/web/20180102173058/https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180102173058/https://mapzen.com...
    - javajosh 9y ago
      What if medium goes out of business?
      - fgonzag 9y ago
danso 9y ago
That’s sad news. I was planning to use them for my programming class. The Geocoding and other APIs, besides being free and generous, were easy to learn and very useful. The technical blog posts were also enlightening.
- riordan 9y ago
  Have you considered teaching your journalism students Docker first?
  - danso 9y ago
    No that’s be too much overhead for a beginners level class.
    - karussell 9y ago
      You could do it on one server and give students access to it using the docs from mapzen
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    > Have you considered teaching your journalism students Docker first? I agree. This would be a great prank. As a bonus, it'd help solidify their disinterest in everything computer-ish, making them more motivated journalism students. Do it OP!
kevincennis 9y ago
Really sad to see. I've been very happy with Mapzen for the past year or so. Their open source stuff is really good, and the service itself is excellent as well. Not quite as polished as Google/Mapbox, but absolutely usable in production apps. Would be very interested to read a post mortem. Did they simply struggle to find users, was their pricing strategy wrong, was quality an issue? If anyone at Mapzen is reading these comments, thank you for all the work you've done. I'll miss you guys.
- snarf21 9y ago
  I know a bunch of the team there but don't know all the inside scoop. They were trying freemium with the hosted services but not many people were paying. One of the issues (imo) is that there really isn't open traffic data (but there should be). This really hampers some of the more interesting routing things and they were focused on a lot of the more multi-modal and pulling in elevation data for biking, etc. Some people were doing some pretty cool stuff with their tools but I think in the end Google gives away enough API transactions for most people and the quality is good enough.
  - bob_theslob646 9y ago
    Can you elaborate on your comment on the open traffic data? Is it difficult to acquire?
    - cbcoutinho 9y ago
      From what I understand of real time traffic data, most of it is generated from mobile users themselves. That means for the most part it'll be Google, and to a lesser extent Apple. If Google thinks it's in its advantage to keep that data closed to benefit their business model, then no one else has access to it.
      - bob_theslob646 9y ago
        Thanks for the insight. So how does a company like Inrix get their data? (http://inrix.com/products/traffic/ http://inrix.com/products/traffic/) On their site, it says this, which seems like bs. >Robust, high quality data INRIX gathers real-time, predictive and historical data from more than 300 million sources, including commercial fleets, GPS, cell towers, mobile devices and cameras. >Calculating traffic at a 100m granularity, we use advanced algorithms and heuristics to ensure data is intelligently fused to true traffic conditions for 8 million kilometers of roads in more than 47 countries, making every trip safer and more efficient.
CPLX 9y ago
I am excited to see a shutdown notice that is clear, short, not full of vague platitudes, and free of the word "journey"
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  That's because they weren't acquired so they don't have to write editorial spin.
  - yeukhon 9y ago
    Is that a requirement? Let say a big startup announces to cease operation with hundreds of paid customers. I think it is totally acceptable for a short announcement like Mapzen’s, but with a seperate page about migration and refund. Then the next is making sure everyone in the company will help taking customer calls. Unless stated otherwise, I think we can assume whenever a company goes out of business, the reason has to be $$. There are special cases like political pressure etc.
  - daenney 9y ago
    Plenty of startups fail and write massive articles about how everything they did was amazing, they were going to cure cancer and all the world's ailments, but something fell through and now they're dead and how it's mostly everyone else's fault. I've seen far more spin around shutdown than acquisitions. The latest of such beauty to come out of the tech world is Otto's shutdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16047382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16047382. And one of their engineer's reply to that spin: https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let-go-i-dont-share-the-same-gratitude-posted-by-some-of-the-team-4029737df4ea https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let...
    - hayksaakian 9y ago
      Otto was acquired if i remember correctly
      - alex_young 9y ago
notyourday 9y ago
I'm breathlessly waiting for another installment into "Our Incredible Journey"
fiatjaf 9y ago
How can we use https://github.com/davidar/ipfs-maps https://github.com/davidar/ipfs-maps ?
- aw3c2 9y ago
  It depends what you need. If you need an outdated, highly filtered dataset, sure. But no need for IPFS, just grab the tiles from https://openmaptiles.com/ https://openmaptiles.com/ where you also find the appropriate license (which this demo does not seem to include...)
drumttocs8 9y ago
Sad to see this. I've been using Mapbox for my projects, if only because their documentation was pretty good for a beginner like me- but Mapzen seemed like an excellent service, and I hate to see that competition die.
GlennS 9y ago
I've made quite a bit of use of Tangram JS (which I was very impressed by), and also of Mapzen's Open Street Map metro extracts and the IMPOSM project. Both very useful - thanks Mapzen. Hope everyone involved manages to find new work swiftly.
- peterbecich 9y ago
  The Metro Extracts tool was super useful to a project my team and I worked on. Thank you Mapzen!
- ben_aus 9y ago
  Are you using Mapzen's vector tiles with Tangram? If so have you decided on a replacement? Mapzen pricing was good, too good it seems. I require access to global tiles but very low amount of requests with a custom Tangram JS yaml.
  - GlennS 9y ago
    I'm not. I usually use Tippecanoe [https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe] to create vector tiles with my data on, and then pick a set of raster tiles from here [http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/ http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/] (the Stamen ones are very nice, and also the ESRI ones are gorgeous but need you to have an ESRI license) for background and labels.
jermaustin1 9y ago
How long until someone makes a script to install and configure all of the opensource products and clones the API to run on a DO droplet?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kevincennis 9y ago
  I remember reading it takes several days on super beefy hardware just to import all of the data from openstreetmap and openaddresses they they use to run mapzen. I don't think this is a thing where you just whip up a docker-compose file and spin up a Heroku dyno.
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    Yep - and (comparatively) not many people focus on open source geo tools, so the developer experience is not where it should be.
  - rmc 9y ago
    I don't know about mapzen, never used their tools. But a common first way to use OSM data is to use osm2pgsql to import the data into PostgreSQL. Yes, on beefy hardware, it can take ~24 hours to import the whole OSM database file for the whole world. One beauty of OSM is that lots of the software can, and does, work for region based extracts, and doesn't require the whole world. You can render tiles, do geocoding, or routing on a per country, or continent basis, depending on what you want. Mapzen provided "metroextract", but Geofabrik (my employer) provides continent/country/state extracts on https://download.geofabrik.de https://download.geofabrik.de You can also cut out your own extracts with osmosis, or osmium-tool, based on the planet/continent/country/state region covering your area of interest.
jimmyrocks 9y ago
Such sad news. Mapzen has been a core component of many projects that I've worked with. They have created and supported many great products that will be missed. They also have been a big part of supporting the GeoNYC group and helping to organize the OpenStreetMap US conferences. Thanks for all the maps and data Mapzen!
pheelicks 9y ago
It is a great shame to see them go, was always impressed with the quality of their products and ecosystem built around it. If there are any Mapzeners here looking for something new, please consider taking a look at www.procedural.eu - we also make a WebGL mapping engine based on OSM data, but our focus is more using procedural generation to augment the data, to generate immersive 3D natural environments for visualizing ski resorts, hiking routes etc.
- samstave 9y ago
  I want to know more
gerry_shaw 9y ago
Anybody know if there is a hosted libpostal service? I didn't notice in the migration document. It's easy to include in our application if we need to but it's used infrequently and consumes a couple of gigabytes of memory so we've found it useful to call as a service when needed.
gd2 9y ago
In with the people who are calling this a sad shutdown.
jlengrand 9y ago
There is a product from Mapzen that I have never seen anywhere else : Isochrones (https://mapzen.com/documentation/mobility/isochrone/api-reference/ https://mapzen.com/documentation/mobility/isochrone/api-refe...). Been interested in this for years (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9403699/map-of-all-points-below-a-certain-time-of-travel https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9403699/map-of-all-point...) They were the only ones to provide a solution. I am super sad to see this go and still haven't seen any alternative. Happy to hear about anything in this direction :s.
- merusame 9y ago
  openrouteservice.org has them also, rest API also available
- rburhum 9y ago
  Ahem: - GRASS has had that since the 80s: https://grass.osgeo.org/grass72/manuals/addons/r.traveltime.html https://grass.osgeo.org/grass72/manuals/addons/r.traveltime.... - ESRI has had those in web form since the 90s: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/analyze/create-drive-time-areas.htm https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/analyze/create-drive... - GeoTrellis has that working in an open source project on top of a Spark cluster: https://transit.geotrellis.io/travelshed.html https://transit.geotrellis.io/travelshed.html
  - jlengrand 9y ago
    Well, yes I can create isochrones myself indeed. What I meant is the ability to generate them via an API without having to handle any GIS / routing data yourself and this for any city. Handling these kind of services takes a lot of time, especially if this is only a sub-part of a more generic product. Thanks for the alternatives though
    - rburhum 9y ago
      The second option can be hosted at ArcGIS Online without you doing anything (i.e. loading anything). It is a REST API. Yes, it is hidden in their stupid docs. The third option is faster than anything else, but would require you to load planet-osm.
jennoo 9y ago
Does anyone recommend a good alternative which embraces the open source mentality so I am allowed to permanently store the data.
- karussell 9y ago
  They have listed only alternatives that have a similar philosophy: https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/
  - lucideer 9y ago
    Not so, unfortunately. For example, while Mapbox use open source (OSM) tiles, other services - e.g. their search API - aren't open, as Mapzen's is(/was). Yet they are listed on that page by Mapzen as an alternative for Search. There may be other such examples in that list.
    - morganherlocker 9y ago
      > For example, while Mapbox use open source (OSM) tiles, other services - e.g. their search API - aren't open, as Mapzen's is(/was). The geocoding engine[1] powering the Mapbox Search API is open source, and has been since its inception in 2012. The same is true of the routing engine[2] powering the Mapbox Directions API (OSRM), and the engine used to create Vector Tiles[3] for the Mapbox Maps API, along with the engines powering most Mapbox APIs. Non-open code at Mapbox is usually tightly coupled to our infrastructure or data processing pipelines, which would not be generally useful to the community at large. The useful bits of even this infrastructure code is also typically abstracted into generally useful libraries for community use, such as earcut[4], rasterio[5], tile-cover[6], and hundreds of other modules of all varieties. - [1] https://github.com/mapbox/carmen - [2] https://github.com/project-osrm/osrm-backend - [3] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik - [4] https://github.com/mapbox/earcut - [5] https://github.com/mapbox/rasterio - [6] https://github.com/mapbox/tile-cover
      - lucideer 9y ago
thinkloop 9y ago
Am I the only one who constantly discovers cool services during their shutdown notices? It feels like half of them can start to make it after the press they get during shutdown.
karussell 9y ago
Anyone from Mapzen here on why this has such a short timeframe for paying customers? Not even 1 month! Are there possibilities to extend this somehow?
sirmike_ 9y ago
Hey there all! I work for Boundless Geo. This sucks. But thankfully we and many like us will be able to help pick up the Geo Spatial slack as it were. Boundless helps reduce the cost and time of deploying and managing geospatial software with a scalable, open GIS platform – including Server, Exchange, Desktop and Connect – and a powerful ecosystem of geospatial knowledge, tools and resources. Please let me know if anyone has any questions!
Edzus124 9y ago
Draudzīgākais Kredīts uzņēmumiem tava biznesa izaugsmei https://www.cityfinances.lv/kredits-uznemumiem/ https://www.cityfinances.lv/kredits-uznemumiem/
kbjudit 9y ago
If you need an alternative, please also keep an eye on MAPCAT. Our OSM-based public map portal is already live (www.mapcat.com), and the map API is just about to be launched. More info at http://try.mapcat.com/ http://try.mapcat.com/
eruci 9y ago
Sorry to hear that. Is openaddresses.io, one of their backed projects dying too? I've been using their data on geocode.xyz, but it seems like there has not been any new data in the past 6 months.

398 points by morisy 9y ago

> we’re optimistic about what’s next. Well... what's next for me is rewriting this application in the next 30 days. Not feeling too "optimistic" there about that.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aw3c2 9y ago
Which API(s) do you rely on? Are you sure that self-hosting them is not an option?
- freyfogle 9y ago
  I can't speak for the commenter above, but as someone who runs a paid service built on open geodata I can tell you our best customers are those who first try to self host and then realize what a pain that is. The challenge is not just keeping the software up to date, but that you also need to keep the data fresh. How fresh of course depends on your exact use case, of course, but for perspective OpenStreetMap has 3-4 million edits per day. It's totally doable - and is technically very interesting, but in much the same way that fixing your own car or baking your own bread is doable and fun. It's more cost-effective to hand it off to a reliable expert. Building/installing is (relatively) easy. Maintaining is hard.
  - MattBlissett 9y ago
    Even without a requirement to stay particularly up to date, the size of the datasets makes working with OpenStreetMap reasonably complicated. I needed tiles in non-web-standard projections: equirectangular and polar (EPSG:4326, 3575 and 3031). ESRI used to provide equirectangular tiles[0], but have deprecated the service. Polarmap have an Arctic map, but only at standard resolution [1]. I couldn't find an Antarctic map. With a fair amount of fiddling, and building on the work OpenMapTiles.org have done, it was possible to generate the tiles, but I now realise why few people have attempted this: it requires a lot of processing power, technical ability to get everything working properly, and cartography to have a map that looks good (not just the final styling, but the choice of what data is present in each layer of vector tiles). I met the minimum of what we needed [2], but I need to find more time to do the rest -- like contours. [0] http://server.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/ESRI_StreetMap_World_2D/MapServer?f=jsapi http://server.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/ESRI_Str... [1] https://webmap.arcticconnect.org/polarmap.js/examples/PolarMap/quick-start/ https://webmap.arcticconnect.org/polarmap.js/examples/PolarM... [2a] Small demo: https://api.gbif.org/v2/map/demo7.html https://api.gbif.org/v2/map/demo7.html (shows northern fulmar seabirds) [2b] An overview of the tiles: https://tile.gbif.org/ui/ https://tile.gbif.org/ui/ [2c] In production https://www.gbif.org/species/2481433 https://www.gbif.org/species/2481433 (click to change the projection)
- gopi_ar 9y ago
  We did a study on self-hosting vs saas for geocoding. Here it is: https://view.attach.io/ryiFAKzmb https://view.attach.io/ryiFAKzmb It's a bit marketing-y though :-) Disclosure: we host an OSM compatible geocoder at https://locationiq.org https://locationiq.org
johansch 9y ago
They are optimistic about getting paid next month.
freyfogle 9y ago
Do you need geocoding? I ask because I am one of the makers of the OpenCage geocoder. We offer forward and reverse geocoding from open data (primarily OpenStreetMap, but also others). We're listed in the migration guide, and we'll be offering 20% off our pricing for all former Mapzen customers. Blog post about that is coming shortly. I hope we can help you. https://geocoder.opencagedata.com https://geocoder.opencagedata.com Edit: here's the post about the 20% lifetime discount for former Mapzen customers: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/mapzen https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/mapzen
- aw3c2 9y ago
  Is your code free and open-source?
  - freyfogle 9y ago
    Our code is not, that said it is "just" a very thin layer to various opensource and open data geocoders. See: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits
    - aw3c2 9y ago
      Oh nice!
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  I'm sorry, but the last time I tried OpenCage it was terrible. And by terrible, I mean in line with everything else that uses OSM-based data. Geocoding is hard and I wish you luck, but you've got a long way to go.
  - heurist 9y ago
    I've never come across a geocoder better or cheaper than Google, unfortunately. They all claim accuracy but fail in trivial cases, or interpolate to the wrong part of the street where Google is spot on (though Google has its occasional flaws). I'd love to see competition but it's probably not coming any time soon.
gopi_ar 9y ago
We're putting up a mapzen / pelias compatible endpoint soon on our geocoding service. https://locationiq.org https://locationiq.org It's OSM compatible at the moment.

LeonM 9y ago

Why are they shutting down?

daenney 9y ago
I'm going to guess: not enough customers to get them to a point where the business is sustainable and not being able to find inverstors that are willing to invest in something like this. They have a very nice product but competing with the likes of Google is hard.
- glennon 9y ago
  Mapzen was part of Samsung.
  - daenney 9y ago
    Ha, I did not know that. I knew it came out of the Samsung accelerator, didn't know they were actually owned by Samsung. My guess is probably wrong in that case. However, from all that I can find it states they're supported by Samsung Research, to me that's not the same thing as 'part of' Samsung, which would imply ownership.
    - pc86 9y ago
      > However, from all that I can find it states they're supported by Samsung Research, to me that's not the same thing as 'part of' Samsung, which would imply ownership. You are correct. They are not owned by Samsung, they were simply part of the accelerator.
      - djsumdog 9y ago
        I could see how this would be a critical concept for Samsung, as it may need to position itself one day to be separate from the Google ecosystem.
      - devalisher 9y ago

NelsonMinar 9y ago

Oh I'm so sad for them. Mapzen has a bunch of really great products and services, they are some of the top experts in open source mapping. It's a shame the business hasn't worked out. They have a good companion post on alternative services for folks needing to migrate. It doubles as a survey of the best in open source mapping tools out there right now. https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ Edit also a post specific to the Who's On First project: https://www.whosonfirst.org/blog/2018/01/02/chapter-two/ https://www.whosonfirst.org/blog/2018/01/02/chapter-two/

brightball 9y ago
Great to know. I’d been thinking about setting up these tools just to tinker anyway.
bsder 9y ago
> They have a good companion post on alternative services for folks needing to migrate. It doubles as a survey of the best in open source mapping tools out there right now. https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ That post needs to be archived somewhere before the shutdown.
- queeerkopf 9y ago
  They took care of that themselves: https://medium.com/postzen/mapzen-alternatives-aa6d857e3532 https://medium.com/postzen/mapzen-alternatives-aa6d857e3532 It's not as nicely formatted though. The Internet Archive has it too and it's closer to the original: http://web.archive.org/web/20180102173058/https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180102173058/https://mapzen.com...
  - javajosh 9y ago
    What if medium goes out of business?
    - fgonzag 9y ago

danso 9y ago

That’s sad news. I was planning to use them for my programming class. The Geocoding and other APIs, besides being free and generous, were easy to learn and very useful. The technical blog posts were also enlightening.

riordan 9y ago
Have you considered teaching your journalism students Docker first?
- danso 9y ago
  No that’s be too much overhead for a beginners level class.
  - karussell 9y ago
    You could do it on one server and give students access to it using the docs from mapzen
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  > Have you considered teaching your journalism students Docker first? I agree. This would be a great prank. As a bonus, it'd help solidify their disinterest in everything computer-ish, making them more motivated journalism students. Do it OP!

kevincennis 9y ago

Really sad to see. I've been very happy with Mapzen for the past year or so. Their open source stuff is really good, and the service itself is excellent as well. Not quite as polished as Google/Mapbox, but absolutely usable in production apps. Would be very interested to read a post mortem. Did they simply struggle to find users, was their pricing strategy wrong, was quality an issue? If anyone at Mapzen is reading these comments, thank you for all the work you've done. I'll miss you guys.

snarf21 9y ago
I know a bunch of the team there but don't know all the inside scoop. They were trying freemium with the hosted services but not many people were paying. One of the issues (imo) is that there really isn't open traffic data (but there should be). This really hampers some of the more interesting routing things and they were focused on a lot of the more multi-modal and pulling in elevation data for biking, etc. Some people were doing some pretty cool stuff with their tools but I think in the end Google gives away enough API transactions for most people and the quality is good enough.
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on your comment on the open traffic data? Is it difficult to acquire?
  - cbcoutinho 9y ago
    From what I understand of real time traffic data, most of it is generated from mobile users themselves. That means for the most part it'll be Google, and to a lesser extent Apple. If Google thinks it's in its advantage to keep that data closed to benefit their business model, then no one else has access to it.
    - bob_theslob646 9y ago
      Thanks for the insight. So how does a company like Inrix get their data? (http://inrix.com/products/traffic/ http://inrix.com/products/traffic/) On their site, it says this, which seems like bs. >Robust, high quality data INRIX gathers real-time, predictive and historical data from more than 300 million sources, including commercial fleets, GPS, cell towers, mobile devices and cameras. >Calculating traffic at a 100m granularity, we use advanced algorithms and heuristics to ensure data is intelligently fused to true traffic conditions for 8 million kilometers of roads in more than 47 countries, making every trip safer and more efficient.

CPLX 9y ago

I am excited to see a shutdown notice that is clear, short, not full of vague platitudes, and free of the word "journey"

hkmurakami 9y ago
That's because they weren't acquired so they don't have to write editorial spin.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  Is that a requirement? Let say a big startup announces to cease operation with hundreds of paid customers. I think it is totally acceptable for a short announcement like Mapzen’s, but with a seperate page about migration and refund. Then the next is making sure everyone in the company will help taking customer calls. Unless stated otherwise, I think we can assume whenever a company goes out of business, the reason has to be $$. There are special cases like political pressure etc.
- daenney 9y ago
  Plenty of startups fail and write massive articles about how everything they did was amazing, they were going to cure cancer and all the world's ailments, but something fell through and now they're dead and how it's mostly everyone else's fault. I've seen far more spin around shutdown than acquisitions. The latest of such beauty to come out of the tech world is Otto's shutdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16047382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16047382. And one of their engineer's reply to that spin: https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let-go-i-dont-share-the-same-gratitude-posted-by-some-of-the-team-4029737df4ea https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let...
  - hayksaakian 9y ago
    Otto was acquired if i remember correctly
    - alex_young 9y ago

notyourday 9y ago

I'm breathlessly waiting for another installment into "Our Incredible Journey"

fiatjaf 9y ago

How can we use https://github.com/davidar/ipfs-maps https://github.com/davidar/ipfs-maps ?

aw3c2 9y ago
It depends what you need. If you need an outdated, highly filtered dataset, sure. But no need for IPFS, just grab the tiles from https://openmaptiles.com/ https://openmaptiles.com/ where you also find the appropriate license (which this demo does not seem to include...)

drumttocs8 9y ago

Sad to see this. I've been using Mapbox for my projects, if only because their documentation was pretty good for a beginner like me- but Mapzen seemed like an excellent service, and I hate to see that competition die.

GlennS 9y ago

I've made quite a bit of use of Tangram JS (which I was very impressed by), and also of Mapzen's Open Street Map metro extracts and the IMPOSM project. Both very useful - thanks Mapzen. Hope everyone involved manages to find new work swiftly.

peterbecich 9y ago
The Metro Extracts tool was super useful to a project my team and I worked on. Thank you Mapzen!
ben_aus 9y ago
Are you using Mapzen's vector tiles with Tangram? If so have you decided on a replacement? Mapzen pricing was good, too good it seems. I require access to global tiles but very low amount of requests with a custom Tangram JS yaml.
- GlennS 9y ago
  I'm not. I usually use Tippecanoe [https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe] to create vector tiles with my data on, and then pick a set of raster tiles from here [http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/ http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/] (the Stamen ones are very nice, and also the ESRI ones are gorgeous but need you to have an ESRI license) for background and labels.

jermaustin1 9y ago

How long until someone makes a script to install and configure all of the opensource products and clones the API to run on a DO droplet?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kevincennis 9y ago
I remember reading it takes several days on super beefy hardware just to import all of the data from openstreetmap and openaddresses they they use to run mapzen. I don't think this is a thing where you just whip up a docker-compose file and spin up a Heroku dyno.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  Yep - and (comparatively) not many people focus on open source geo tools, so the developer experience is not where it should be.
- rmc 9y ago
  I don't know about mapzen, never used their tools. But a common first way to use OSM data is to use osm2pgsql to import the data into PostgreSQL. Yes, on beefy hardware, it can take ~24 hours to import the whole OSM database file for the whole world. One beauty of OSM is that lots of the software can, and does, work for region based extracts, and doesn't require the whole world. You can render tiles, do geocoding, or routing on a per country, or continent basis, depending on what you want. Mapzen provided "metroextract", but Geofabrik (my employer) provides continent/country/state extracts on https://download.geofabrik.de https://download.geofabrik.de You can also cut out your own extracts with osmosis, or osmium-tool, based on the planet/continent/country/state region covering your area of interest.

jimmyrocks 9y ago

Such sad news. Mapzen has been a core component of many projects that I've worked with. They have created and supported many great products that will be missed. They also have been a big part of supporting the GeoNYC group and helping to organize the OpenStreetMap US conferences. Thanks for all the maps and data Mapzen!

pheelicks 9y ago

It is a great shame to see them go, was always impressed with the quality of their products and ecosystem built around it. If there are any Mapzeners here looking for something new, please consider taking a look at www.procedural.eu - we also make a WebGL mapping engine based on OSM data, but our focus is more using procedural generation to augment the data, to generate immersive 3D natural environments for visualizing ski resorts, hiking routes etc.

samstave 9y ago
I want to know more

gerry_shaw 9y ago

Anybody know if there is a hosted libpostal service? I didn't notice in the migration document. It's easy to include in our application if we need to but it's used infrequently and consumes a couple of gigabytes of memory so we've found it useful to call as a service when needed.

gd2 9y ago

In with the people who are calling this a sad shutdown.

jlengrand 9y ago

There is a product from Mapzen that I have never seen anywhere else : Isochrones (https://mapzen.com/documentation/mobility/isochrone/api-reference/ https://mapzen.com/documentation/mobility/isochrone/api-refe...). Been interested in this for years (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9403699/map-of-all-points-below-a-certain-time-of-travel https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9403699/map-of-all-point...) They were the only ones to provide a solution. I am super sad to see this go and still haven't seen any alternative. Happy to hear about anything in this direction :s.

merusame 9y ago
openrouteservice.org has them also, rest API also available
rburhum 9y ago
Ahem: - GRASS has had that since the 80s: https://grass.osgeo.org/grass72/manuals/addons/r.traveltime.html https://grass.osgeo.org/grass72/manuals/addons/r.traveltime.... - ESRI has had those in web form since the 90s: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/analyze/create-drive-time-areas.htm https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/analyze/create-drive... - GeoTrellis has that working in an open source project on top of a Spark cluster: https://transit.geotrellis.io/travelshed.html https://transit.geotrellis.io/travelshed.html
- jlengrand 9y ago
  Well, yes I can create isochrones myself indeed. What I meant is the ability to generate them via an API without having to handle any GIS / routing data yourself and this for any city. Handling these kind of services takes a lot of time, especially if this is only a sub-part of a more generic product. Thanks for the alternatives though
  - rburhum 9y ago
    The second option can be hosted at ArcGIS Online without you doing anything (i.e. loading anything). It is a REST API. Yes, it is hidden in their stupid docs. The third option is faster than anything else, but would require you to load planet-osm.

jennoo 9y ago

Does anyone recommend a good alternative which embraces the open source mentality so I am allowed to permanently store the data.

karussell 9y ago
They have listed only alternatives that have a similar philosophy: https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/ https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/
- lucideer 9y ago
  Not so, unfortunately. For example, while Mapbox use open source (OSM) tiles, other services - e.g. their search API - aren't open, as Mapzen's is(/was). Yet they are listed on that page by Mapzen as an alternative for Search. There may be other such examples in that list.
  - morganherlocker 9y ago
    > For example, while Mapbox use open source (OSM) tiles, other services - e.g. their search API - aren't open, as Mapzen's is(/was). The geocoding engine[1] powering the Mapbox Search API is open source, and has been since its inception in 2012. The same is true of the routing engine[2] powering the Mapbox Directions API (OSRM), and the engine used to create Vector Tiles[3] for the Mapbox Maps API, along with the engines powering most Mapbox APIs. Non-open code at Mapbox is usually tightly coupled to our infrastructure or data processing pipelines, which would not be generally useful to the community at large. The useful bits of even this infrastructure code is also typically abstracted into generally useful libraries for community use, such as earcut[4], rasterio[5], tile-cover[6], and hundreds of other modules of all varieties. - [1] https://github.com/mapbox/carmen - [2] https://github.com/project-osrm/osrm-backend - [3] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik - [4] https://github.com/mapbox/earcut - [5] https://github.com/mapbox/rasterio - [6] https://github.com/mapbox/tile-cover
    - lucideer 9y ago

thinkloop 9y ago

Am I the only one who constantly discovers cool services during their shutdown notices? It feels like half of them can start to make it after the press they get during shutdown.

karussell 9y ago

Anyone from Mapzen here on why this has such a short timeframe for paying customers? Not even 1 month! Are there possibilities to extend this somehow?

sirmike_ 9y ago

Hey there all! I work for Boundless Geo. This sucks. But thankfully we and many like us will be able to help pick up the Geo Spatial slack as it were. Boundless helps reduce the cost and time of deploying and managing geospatial software with a scalable, open GIS platform – including Server, Exchange, Desktop and Connect – and a powerful ecosystem of geospatial knowledge, tools and resources. Please let me know if anyone has any questions!

Edzus124 9y ago

Draudzīgākais Kredīts uzņēmumiem tava biznesa izaugsmei https://www.cityfinances.lv/kredits-uznemumiem/ https://www.cityfinances.lv/kredits-uznemumiem/

kbjudit 9y ago

If you need an alternative, please also keep an eye on MAPCAT. Our OSM-based public map portal is already live (www.mapcat.com), and the map API is just about to be launched. More info at http://try.mapcat.com/ http://try.mapcat.com/

eruci 9y ago

Sorry to hear that. Is openaddresses.io, one of their backed projects dying too? I've been using their data on geocode.xyz, but it seems like there has not been any new data in the past 6 months.