December 5, 2013
By combining local, social, and mobile into a single experience, Citymaps has quickly revolutionized online mapping. Citymaps’ innovations marry a vector-based, detailed view of a city’s business landscape, with local search, interactive discovery, social sharing, and commerce. Citymaps launched its new mapping service this past summer, earning praise from many users and from Techcrunch and GigaOM.
Unlike traditional online mapping, Citymaps learns user patterns and adapts to a user’s personal interests. Users can share their favorite personal maps or check out the personal maps of their friends, mentors, and favorite celebrities. Today, Citymaps has over 15 million businesses already plugged into the service. Citymaps users can easily retrieve directions, menus, Instagram photos, Foursquare tips, and they can easily contribute content and pictures to a generated map.
Citymaps selected Riak Riak to store strategic data at the heart of their service. Citymaps wanted a distributed database that could meet the need of their rapid growth, while also being operationally easy to manage. Riak stores user avatars, business images and icons, and other strategic map data. It will also be used for distributed API caching in the future.
Citymaps is available on iOS in the Apple App Store. Citymaps plans to serve Android users by year-end.
