If you are looking to create high quality maps for cities in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and at least 10 other countries, we have some good news for you. Microsoft Virtual Earth’s June imagery release includes satellite/ortho shots of these areas, which allow for impressively-high zoom levels. See updated locations on the map.

For the past two days (July 19/20) OpenStreetMap held mapping parties in Denver. A mapping party is where a group of openstreetmappers and novices descend on an area to map it exhaustively (more on mapping parties). As you can imagine, the goal was to collect as much data on downtown Denver as possible. As a result, the Denver map has been greatly improved (and it is already available!).

If you are interested in maps and mapping we encourage you to get involved with OpenStreetMap. It is a great community and a great cause. We’ve been using OpenStreetMap with UMapper since the very beginning and we love it.

UMapper was unavailable for a few hours today due to disruptions in Amazon’s S3 service. We apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused. As of right now the service has been fully restored. We will keep you updated as soon as we get the explanation from Amazon.

Creating a map with a large number of points can get frustrating, especially if you have to locate each of those points manually. In an effort to make things simpler (and faster), we added a new search tool, which allows to query both Wikipedia and GeoNames location databases.

The new tools can be found under the “Quick Points” heading in the toolbar on the right. The functionality is pretty straightforward: select a search option, enter a keyword, add returned markers to the map.

To see this functionality in action see Wikipedia mountain search and San Diego Maritime Museum maps.

Yesterday, we hit a pretty big milestone - 500 public maps have been created on UMapper! Considering that we are is still in it’s ALPHA stage, five hundred is a significant number. To celebrate this cosmic event we would like to showcase several newly-posted, cool maps.

Long Way Down
If you have seen Long Way Round, you are going to like this. Long Way Down is the latest motorbike adventure with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. They will travel down through Europe, and then Africa – from Tunisia to South Africa, via countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia.

Odecabe Map
This map is a good example of UMapper maps being used for business purposes. The map showcases sites related to ODECABE and its member countries.

2008 Tour de France Stage Map
Our team member (brettg) created this 2008 Tour de France Stage map to showcase recently-released line functionality.