After more than six months of rigorous testing, constant improvements and new feature releases, UMapper is rolling into BETA. Thank you for accelerating UMapper’s evolution and helping to make it better!

Over the past months UMapper has enjoyed fast growth, high user participation and raving reviews from Mashable, Google Maps Mania and many others. Keir Clarke, the editor for Google Maps Mania says:

“It is one of the better map creation tools that I have seen. It excels in the amount of options it gives the user.”

So, what can you do with UMapper?

• Create maps using Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google or OpenStreetMap
• Draw Lines, Points, Polygons, Circles
• Search Wikipedia and Geonames for geo-tagged entries
• Import GPS (.gpx) traces, KML and GeoRSS feeds

In addition, you also can:

• Integrate UMapper into your website via our API
• Share maps on your website, blog or social network
• Resize embedded maps
• Restrict access to your maps or create publicly editable map Wiki’s
• Invite people to edit your maps
• And much more …

If you haven’t visited UMapper lately, you should definitely check out some of the new features we have added. Let us know about features you’d like to see and what we can do better. Most of all, thanks for your support!

Cheers,
The UMapper Team

To showcase some of the cool maps created on UMapper, we are starting a new Map Of the Week category. Each week our team is going to pick a map to feature. To kick things off, here is a cool Asia Travel map by stas_kulesh.

Creating maps with UMapper just got easier. The new version of our map-authoring application makes it a snap to import GPS traces, KML (Google Earth) files and GeoRSS feeds. Data can be imported directly from your desktop or a geo-enabled website. To illustrate this functionality, we created a sample map (below) which was imported from GPSies.com.

The import functionality is still in beta, let us know if you find bugs or have any feature suggestions.

In addition to data import, our map-authoring application got a new, streamlined look! If you haven’t already, check it out.

In addition to the satellite imagery update, Microsoft has updated the style of the British Isles map in its September imagery release. 46TB of new imagery is now available through UMapper maps. Use the map below to see the complete list of updated locations.

Today we released a new version of the embed movie with new marker clustering functionality. Now, markers are grouped under a circular icon that indicates the number of markers in the group. The group icon is also sized based on the number of markers it contains. This new feature makes it easier to identify groups and visualize their size. Check out the map of the TechCrunch 50 below for an example.

As always, we are looking forward to your feedback on this new feature.