This weekend, starting Friday, 10th of July, the 3rd annual OpenStreetMap Conference - State of The Map 2009 - will be hosted at the CCC Conference Center, right here in our home town Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

We first started implementing OSM data in our early release of Pocketbliin in September 2007. Back then and today still, Google Maps TOS would prevent developers from using Google Map data in Mobile Applications. Our strategy to be independent from any particular Map provider - which we continued to pursue resulting in our implementation of OpenLayers Map API on our desktop service - and the excellent & growing Map database from OSM made us choose for OSM. OpenStreetMap data is currently still available on our Mobile and Desktop service … for which we are truly thankful.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference is OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast who will be kicking off the conference on Friday morning 9am. See the complete conference schedule here. Another interesting presentation to watch should be by Steve’s co-founder of CloudMade: Nick Black. CloudMade has been developing an impressive portfolio of Tools and API’s to enable developers to “make the most of map data” … using OSM data. Registration is still open and we hope to see you there!

Lastly, we congratulate the entire OSM community and are - once again - truly grateful for the service offered. As a small token of our appreciation we are showing OpenStreetMap as the default Map layer on our Desktop service.

with kind,
bliin team