CloudMade is a company which produces APIs, rendered maps, and geographic-related services. Unlike many other companies in the same field, CloudMade uses exclusively Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

-licensed OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Two major driving forces behind the establishment and growth of OSM have been restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world and the advent of inexpensive portable GPS devices.The...

 data, and was cofounded by the founder of OpenStreetMap, Steve Coast. Many of its products compete with Google Maps

Google Maps

Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...

 by providing APIs for web sites, applications, and devices to use the rendered map data.

CloudMade's Style Editor allows users to edit the color scheme and layers visible in web-accessible maps - allowing customization that Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and other large-scale competitors have not provided.

CloudMade is distributed between London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 (United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

), Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

 (Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

), Stuttgart

Stuttgart

Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....

 (Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

) and Menlo Park, CA (USA).

CloudMade's map renderings, combined with the OpenLayers

OpenLayers

OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and Bing Maps...

 javascript interface, have recently been used on the White House

White House

The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

's Delivering on Change map.

CloudMade recorded a loss for 2008 of £1,426,585, with a loss for 2009 of a further £2,149,259.On October 5, 2010, OpenStreetMap founder and CloudMade cofounder Steve Coast resigned from all positions within the company. In November, Steve announced that he had accepted a position as Principal Architect at Microsoft's

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Bing

Bing

Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft.Bing may also refer to:* An onomatopœia of a bell sound* Bing cherry, a variety of cherry* Bing , Chinese flatbread* Bing , a German company that manufactured toys and kitchen utensils...

 Mobile.

Notable milestones

• February 2009 — CloudMade launched its platform to mobile and web developers and signed up over 2,000 developers since.
• The British newspaper, The Guardian
  The Guardian
  The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
  
  recently launched a new site built using CloudMade mapping and geo services.
• May 2009 — Useful Networks announced their mapNinja app for the iPhone supports out-of-box connectivity to four different mapping providers including CloudMade.