A good week for OpenStreetMap

It's quite an exciting time for the folks involved in OpenStreetMap (which includes me). On 5th Feburary an appeal was launched to raise £10,000 for a new server for the project. Seventy-two hours later that amount had been raised, in no small part due to Google donating half the total in one go. The donations have kept rolling in and more hardware is being added to the shopping list.

Next, Cloudmade, the startup company created by OSM founder Steve Coast and early OSMer Nick Black is holding its first launch events in San Francisco and London. Cloudmade takes the open OSM data and repackages it into commercial products. This benefits the project, because for Cloudmade's products to be competitive, it needs the dataset to be as complete and accurate as possible, and so has been funding efforts to fill the gaps in OSM's coverage by providing money for Mapping Parties.

There's also the acquisition of SiRF by Cambridge Silicon Radio. The SiRFStar III GPS chipset is one of the best on the market, providing accurate fixes in tricky conditions, and a rapid Time to First Fix. It's also not very expensive in volume. If accurate GPS receivers find their way into more devices -- CSR's products tend to integrate several technologies in one chip -- then more people will own a device capable of providing data to OSM.

While there are still plenty of gaps in OpenStreetMap, things are looking bright for open geodata.