#sotmeu

I guess it's a two blog post kinda day!

This past weekend was the State of the Map EU event for 2014, which was held in Karlsruhe in Germany.

While nobody from the Nestoria dev team attended, our sister company OpenCage Data was a Silver level sponsor and sent three guys along, including Ed Freyfogle, one of the founders of Nestoria, and Marc Tobias Metten ex-Nestoria Perl hacker extraordinaire.

On top of that they made an important announcement which definitely affects Nestoria: the OpenCage Geocoder API is now live! For the eight (soon to be nine) countries that Nestoria operates in, the OpenCage Geocoder is using our geocoder in the background. It's a pretty nice piece of kit - written in Perl - that we are very proud of.

The challenge of geocoding property listings is quite a unique one. Sure some countries, like the UK, are super easy. But for every UK there's a France (where the agents actively try to obfuscate where the property is) or an India ("opposite landmark x, behind landmark y") or a Mexico (there are at least five Calle 23's in Mexico City!)

Hopefully others will find our geocoder useful, and in turn will give us feedback about how we can make it even better. Best of all right now using the API is completely free, and going forward we have pledged to always provide a free tier of access.

If you're interested in more details check out this video of the announcement from our Geotechnologist In Residence Gary Gale:

More details about the talk and the State of the Map conference itself on Gary's Blog Mostly Maps.

You can read all about OpenCage Data and the OpenCage Geocoder on their blog which is, predictably, at blog.opencagedata.com.

Since the earliest days of Lokku (back in the neogeo dark ages of 2006) we've been admirers of and participants in OpenStreetMap. Even when we were just a small team with more vision than lines of code we found the money to sponsor the very first State of the Map, the annual gathering of OpenStreetMap enthusiasts. Fast forward eight years and Lokku has grown a lot, and so has OSM. So much so that now, along with an annual global SotM there are are also regional and national conferences.

Over the years it has been our pleasure to sponsor and present at many of them (and to support OSM in other ways), and as a founder of Lokku I'm very proud to announce that this year we will be continuing the long-standing tradition. Our brand OpenCage Data is an official sponsor of State of the Map Europe which will take place in Karlsruhe (not far from where I spent several years of my childhood!) June 13-15th. If past indication is any guide the event will be very well organised and offer some great talks and good fun. 

Our portfolio brand SplashMaps has submitted a talk (and will hopefully be able to show off the first non-UK maps!) and we've also submitted a few of our own. Indeed, we've just started a new geo related project which we hope to announce and show off in Karlsruhe. To kickstart the project we slipped out of the office for a bit of geo team building in Greenwich. 

So if European geoinnovation is your thing, we hope to see you in Karlsruhe in June. But for those that can't quite wait, we invite you to join us on the 13th of May here in London for the next #geomob - and if you can't make either there'll be another #geomob on the 17th of July. 

yours in geo-innovation,