Eric visits Door2Door!
This week we had the pleasure of hosting a masterclass by Eric Gunderson, the CEO of Mapbox, here at Door2Door HQ. Mapbox is one of the hottest startups in the geo field and just raised $52.6M in their most recent funding round. Eric brought the cutting edge valley feeling to our Berlin office and we could definitely feel the excitement coursing through his veins at the thought of the amazing opportunities in the geo industry. Both Door2Door and Mapbox are heavily involved in the OpenStreetMap community and from the get go Eric told us how much he likes and appreciates our aggressively open stance with regards to the data we generate.
He also shared his love for our Apple Watch version of ally mobility app— which is in fact the first app to make use of Mapbox Directions API for this device! From here he talked about our current state: one in which we are constantly surrounded by sensors that produce massive amounts of location based data. Making sense of this data is where we come in and as geo startups have a tremendous opportunity to utilize all this information and build something great out of it.
Mapbox exemplifies this through their Directions API, and over the next few months their Berlin based routing team will focus on integrating real time data into their routing. However to achieve this quite a lot of restructuring is necessary in OSRM; building the graph alone currently takes 6+ hours of work. So in order to incorporate real time data this approach isn’t effective. Thus in order to get this data they recently launched OpenTraffic, with partners such as the World Bank and Mapzen, but we mustn’t forget the massive responisbility that comes with the collection of this type of data and therefore the caution and server security that accompanies it.
Towards the end he gave us some interesting insights into the daily operations of Mapbox itself. For instance: how they prefer Slack over Hipchat and how they exclusively operate on Github as a management tool — giving us lots of interesting tips to learn from!
At Door2Door we are really excited to have such an inspiring and progressive partner in the industry and are really looking forward to working together in the future!
