Harry saves CloudMade

So you might have heard the news that we had to lay off our community ambassadors (you know, the guys we employ, not the ones in Kiev who actually pay for the privilege of working for me).

So I'm really sad about this. As you know, I'm all heart. But some of my 26 fellow CM executives are less cuddly and did the math on how many contributions our ambassadors were bringing in.

    300 new school mappers (thanks Sarah)
+ 250 OSMers energized by lol-tastic SOTM speech (thanks Dirk)
+ 1 super-productive super-happy SteveC (thanks Hurricane)
 - 58 bulk imports that would have been done by crschmidt (thanks Russ)

    Divide into 6,370,031km of highways
= US mapped in 238,764 years

So when I explained to the board that our US streetmap would now ship in AD 240772 rather than the previously promised 2010, they got a bit antsy.

Fortunately Harry - you know, the tall blonde guy from some place beginning with N, who isn't Andy - is going to save CloudMade. He's getting the community to go after those guys who leech OSM's tiles (like, the whole iPhone App Store) and hammer them for license infringement. So when Harry says:

There's a bunch of paid-for iPhone apps springing up which use our maps and our tile servers, and don't credit OpenStreetMap at all. Break out the red text for those kinds of things.

"Break out the red text" is kind of wikispeak for "get medieval on their ass". Think of it as crowd-sourced vigilanteism. And then our hardcore sales team moves in for the kill - every app that OSMers block from the tileserver is a new client for CloudMade. Epic win I think.

Occasionally Juha asks me why we don't just develop our own iPhone apps, so raking in the money while building our brand. I explain to him that the ecosystem is more important, and he nods sagely, deep in thought. It's a good job VC guys always take a long-term view.

Farewell community guys, we'll miss you. Much love. Namaste.