31–40 of 114 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's in Forbes?
forbes.com/sites might as well be wordpress.com, it's just some blog. Pretty amazing how little such a big brand is actually worth.
"Every time you touch the map, the map is learning," Gundersen says. "It's that flywheel." Curious quote. A flywheel stores energy. What does that have to do with a system learning as it's used? Also curious phrasing. "That flywheel"? Which flywheel?
I'm not an expert, and I'm not sure that this in fact a valid interpretation of that concept, but I know that it's a popular concept in certain business circles.
https://openmaptiles.org (only map tiles)
https://stadiamaps.com (map tiles, static maps & routing)
https://www.thunderforest.com (only maps)
https://geocoder.opencagedata.com (only geocoding)
https://geocode.earth (only geocoding)
Tile providers are very thankful for the excellent rendering libraries built by Mapbox, Mapzen, and the Leaflet project. Most maps either use Leaflet.js or MapBox GL JS (open source) for their rendering agent, now that Mapzen is defunct (although their rendering library, tangrams, is now open source).
(I am a co-founder of Stadia Maps.)
I have no evidence to support it, but this article feels like bought and paid for PR.
All media is bought and paid for PR. The only question is who's paying for it and why. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. It's just the way it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's risky to leave customers out that will feed your competition.
Every business decision carries risk. The question is whether or not the risk is acceptable. If you don't want to serve any customers making under $10M, then other companies serving those customers are not your competition. At least not today. Is there a risk they might take their broader customer base and use it to compete with you upmarket some day? Yes. But that's why you do things like build a brand, relationship…
What do they mean by that?
I generally like Mapbox but I've had some problems with the quality of their geocoding and still would get better results from Google's geocoding. It was a pretty niche thing, though: mapbox doesn't have as many European postcodes, but Europeans in several countries don't really treat postcodes with much respect to begin with. In particular, mapbox has no Eircodes whatsoever.
Google's entire advantage here is the amount of resources they've poured into their data; nobody else has been able to match it so far.
EDIT: After doing a bit of poking and prodding, it does seem to be a lot better than it used to be.
I have no evidence to support it, but this article feels like bought and paid for PR.
All media is bought and paid for PR. The only question is who's paying for it and why. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. It's just the way it is.
I know directly of at least one recent instance where a local news company was not allowed to interview a professional directly related to a story it was airing...because one of their big advertisers wouldn't allow anyone in that field to be interviewed unless it was an affiliate of theirs.
I'm being purposely vague there, but even the reporter was really upset about it.
Also, if anyone from Mapbox is reading this, you need to be more clear about what is considered "commercial". At the top of the pricing page you define a commercial app as:
Paid web app or website (fee or subscription)
Private web app or website with restricted access
Asset tracking app or website to monitor people or things
If your app is for internal business use by employees,
or if it is not accessible or functional for members
of the general public then we consider that a
Commercial app.
There are some other alternatives that are more truly "pay as you go" or have affordable tiers for commercial apps:
TomTom - https://developer.tomtom.com/store/maps-api
MapQuest - https://developer.mapquest.com/plans
Stadia Maps - https://stadiamaps.com/
There is also MapFit, which says it has "Clear pricing that scales with you" but doesn't actually explain any of their pricing:
If anyone else has good alternatives that are affordable for solo devs, especially ones with good alternatives to the Google Maps Places API, I'd love to hear about them.
Last I checked, MapBox's WebGL based vector tile renderer was a cut above the rest. For simple mapping, Google's stuff may cut it, but MapBox has the ability to draw complex vector polygons over a wide area that render/zoom/scroll fast and provide a nice experience. This is pretty important if you want to provide fine grained analysis of geographic areas. If you wanted this on GMaps, you were stuck rendering all your…
It really is. I've done a lot of work in the web with various rendering engines, and it's hard to beat the quality of MapBox GL.