14 DAY TRIAL // Online mapping is difficult, this is why there aren't that many companies doing it. Generally, Google dominates, and for good reason, as it has the most accurate and the best looking maps.
It's also got hundreds of people working on them, from the infrastructure powering the service all the way up to people manually fixing problems and merging different data sets.
But that doesn't mean you need hundreds of people or that you need Google's bank accounts to compete in the online mapping world.
MapBox believes an open approach is best, and by open it actually means open and collaborative rather than Google's definition.
Up until now, it's been working with OpenStreetMap data, but also building on top of it, providing better looking tiles, for example.
But it's now embarking on an even more ambitious project, namely satellite maps. Satellite imagery maps sound simple, you just need the photos. And since NASA publishes everything it captures, including photos of every inch of our planet, to the public domain, that shouldn't be a problem.
But if you were simply to take satellite photos and stitch them together you'd soon realize that most of our planet is covered by clouds most of the time.
If there aren't any clouds, there may be fog, or snow, and so on. Creating a beautiful representation of our planet from satellite images is tricky.
But MapBox has a very ingenious solution. Armed with terabytes of imagery from 2011 and 2012 from NASA, the company set about extracting the most information from the data.
The company devised an algorithm which stacks all the images on top of each other. It then reorders every pixel in the stack bringing the best ones, i.e. the ones with the most detail, to the top.
It then does an average of the clearest pixels and then uses that value as the canonical one. In the end, MapBox is left with perfect looking images, with no clouds in sight and no signs of stitching at any zoom level.
