Recenly I came across this interesting TED talk by Frederic Kaplan who is the Digital Humanities Chair at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the EPFL’s Digital Humanities Lab Director. In a fun and interesting talk Kaplan shows off the Venice Time Machine, a project to digitize 80 kilometers of books to create a historical and geographical simulation of Venice across 1000 years.
The project ambitions to reconstruct a large open access database that could be used for research and education. The Venice Time Machine will give the archives a new, virtual existence on the Web. It will reanimate Venice’s past life from them by re-creating social networks and family trees, and visualising urban development and design. An open digital archive of Venetian treasures will provide an entirely new research environment. Think of it as a Google Maps for time.
source: TED
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CartoDB has acquired Nutiteq, a cross-platform mobile mapping SDK platform that is used by 15 million users including Lonely Planet, Accenture among others. The acquisition of Nutiteq is a strategic addition to the startup that is famous for its 1-click mapping tool. Guess we know where a percent of 23M series funding that CartoDB raised in September last year is headed now 😉
CartoDB + Nutiteq
CartoDB’s core strength has been its dynamic visualisations that enable businesses to discover trends from location data. Its Twitter maps have been simply awesome (Read: mapping geotagged tweets). With the acquisition of Nutiteq, CartoDB’s users will now get the opportunity to be able to develop apps using Nutiteq’s SDK as a one-stop solution for vector basemaps, custom maps, online and offline routing, etc. From the initial impression, it does look similar to some of the capabilities of Mapbox. It would be interesting to see how this develops.
Interested in reading the official blogs by the two companies. Here’s the link to Nutiteq’s post and this one redirects to the CartoDB’s post.
Best wishes to CartoDB and Nutiteq from the Geoawesomeness team 🙂 Mapping startups are certainly on a roll!
