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Let?s get things rolling guys. Let?s welcome Javier to the AMA. Thank you very much for joining us in The Spatial Community and answering the community?s questions. Anyone who joins, feel free to ask questions and upvote interesting ones that have already been asked. Javier will do his best to answer as many questions as possible in the next hour.

^

Hi everybody! Looking forward to answer all questions!

Hi @jatorre, how is the name change working out? Are you seeing a direct benefit yet?

@jatorre uploaded a file: https://thespatialcommunity.slack.com/files/jatorre/F2Z8LLK88/img_8819.jpg

Let?s get the word out there about the AMA. Click to tweet http://ctt.ec/sdNeM

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@gisdev-km pretty good! First thing lot of people where calling us already Carto, so that made it easier. But I think the DB was quite confussing for some of our clients.

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@gisdev-km plus someone shared an analysis the other day, as weird as it might sound, that shortening our name has given us 4% higher probablities to IPO!

@jatorre is CartoCSS dead or not?! :laughing: :ghost:

How has the web mapping platform changed since you started? Are you seeing growth or has it stalemated a bit? Seeing more mobile vs desktop?

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@themapsmith Yay! It is not for sure! We are actually expanding its capabilities and transofrmations for other languages. I do believe CartoCSS is a great breaktrhough and I think it has a great space

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What is Carto doing for the elections? Do you have an elections map or anything to share with everyone?

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@gisdev-km Growing! A lot! Now, we are seeing an expanding on the use cases tho? web mapping was pretty much a visualization technique in lot of cases, now we are seeing it applied more to solving particular problems. On mobile and desktop we see very different use cases. Obviously the demand for Mobile Mapping is going crazy too, but quite different to what you see in Desktop. Think of Pokemon, Uber investing 500M on mapping? it is getting a lot of traction but in more expanding use cases

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Hey @julien we have not created a map ourselves, but have worked with a number of our users and clients. I think we can count around 30 live maps that we are aware off, but for curiosity we are expanding our rendering stack to double our capacity today

Meanwhile I hope I am not taking anybody from voting! Please vote!

@jatorre: Carto has some great traction in the UN and humanitarian sphere, and I encourage my colleagues to use it, but for the projects I'm working on, everything needs to be designed mobile and offline first. Do offline capabilities exist, or is it on the roadmap?

Considering the fucking weird times we live in i find myself reflecting on business practices as well as capability when looking at various solutions and platforms... to that end when it comes to business decisions, what comes first your money or your morals?

@max: thats tricky when it comes to web mapping yes. So right now CARTO Builder does not work on offline maps without quite some tricks :disappointed: Buuut. Our Mobile SDK has the best OFFLINE support of all SDKs out there. You can not only have custom OSM maps on it, but download region packages, routing and search. \

better yet. stay involved in the AMA from the mobile app while you wait to vote! https://thespatialcommunity.slack.com/archives/ama-javier-carto-2016/p1478632113000049

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@robodonut: well, honestly I havent found myself luckily in siatuation where I have to choose between money or morals. We do have an internal policy tho to not engage with certain industries directly (oil/gas and military) and sometimes we have had to evaluate if working with a particular project, but overall has not been a big issue. I do take morals first, I think is the best long term decissions always

thank your for your reply

Meanwhile on the geek side, anynody has a proj4 for this? http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2016/10/28/hajime-narukawa-authagraph/

I'm curious to hear more about your analysis offering. I believe Carto has a new product offering?

we wanting dymaxion for proj4 too

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yes @talldave ! It is called CARTO Builder. Think of the Editor but if we add it a visual langauge to perform analysis (plus lot of other things). It is based on Spatial SQL but we are extending it with custom PL/Python custom analysis done by our research team. Our goal is to enable users with no SQL expertise to run spatial analysis and to offer a good set of analysis for custom workflows

i'll take a dymaxion and a waterman please

both vector and raster analysis? is the cost based on compute time?

@talldave you can learn a bit about here https://carto.com/learn/guides btw

@talldave we are focusing mainly on vector. We do have some raster stuff in it, but really we are a vector engine? so dont expect too much raster analysis? for now :slightly_smiling_face:

Have you guys done much in the agriculture sector?

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@robodonut did you know I am Agriculture Engineer? I wish we have done much more. We have done some, for example check out http://agricgear.com/ But agriculture is an area where I think lots still needs to happen. And most of the time is about enabling simple things, making them accesible. Biggest challenge we find lot of cases is around accesibility of spatial analysis for users? agriculture is a paradigmatic one.

What?s the biggest selling point in using Carto over Esri or Mapbox? What sets you apart?

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@jatorre Are there any new or upcoming features/tools (or just a new area you guys are exploring) that you're personally excited about? Something that made you go "wow, this is awesome!"?

/points @gisdev-km +10 for cutting to meat of it

erikfriesen has awarded @gisdev-km 10 points

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@gisdev-km with Mapbox really I would say we do not compete that much, we are providing a Location Intelligence platform. Our business is enabling organizations to take better decisions based on Location Data and Spatial analysis, not just creating maps. Of course there is overlap in some areas and I think our core differenciator there is been around a different workflow that is easier to use and support more real time rendering, quering, etc. In the case of ESRI we are enabling lot of organizations with little GIS expertise and that want to get things done without having to become ESRI experts. Again ease of use.

Thanks!

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@mizuwari3857 love your name! I am very excited about many things coming! The new Builder offers an entire new visual language for spatial analysys, I think that is REALLY COOL. We are also working on High Performance Analytics to work at entire different scale of data, and that is super promising, and finally on mobile, routing and searching offline makes for some awesome new use cases I am super excited too :slightly_smiling_face:

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@jatorre Can you tell us a little bit about Carto?s history as a business. How did you guys get your first round of funding and some of the challenges you had growing the company.

hello everyone! :wave:

hi @geokid

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@julien without going into full history mode. We started Vizzuality after my work as sceintist on Biodiversity Informatics. Worked on lot of projects that needed better mapping and spatial analysis (environmental issues). On the process we created our own framework for developing those projects with PostGIS and Mapnik. Eventually we thiught it would be great to have a UI and a product around it, and thats when CartoDB was born. We focus on product from then, we raised our series A with a European investor and then B with Accel and Salesforce.

Challenges on growing? A LOT! But is also fun to be honest, is like trying to solve a puzzle everyday. Companies are very different when they are 10 people to 25 to 100 that we are now. Creating an effective management, teams working in parallel? is like a crash course everyday to be honest :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks for your response! Another question, If I recall right, when I used carto.js a while ago, it seemed like it was largely built off leaflet, kind of the way mapbox.js was. With the move to more vector layers, are you building a lot of that infrastructure yourself, or using mapbox-gl under the hood the way esri.js currently is?

Hey Javier. Thanks for doing this. My question: carto mostly does vector. is raster visualization/processing on the roadmap? Or what is the demand like for raster from you clients?

What is Carto?s work-force? centralized, distributed? preference or opportunities to work remote?

hey @max yes, we love Leaflet and we will continue investing on it, we think is an awesome library. We are now collaborating with Mapzen on Tangram which we think is also awesome and built on top of Leaflet. So you will see us going much more in that direction

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@jatorre What kind of skills/abilities are you looking for long-term from your future employees?

@jatorre we?re seeing a bunch of activity in the automotive sector, will we be seeing carto in a dashboard anytime soon?

@rossbernet good question. When we started I though raster was going to be a huge part of our platform, and we did invest on postgis raster support, there is actually some support not publicise inside Carto already. But when it comes to use case we found lot of them on the research space (i guess thats why I thought about them) and not so much on other type of sectors, so we decided to focus. With that being said there are a number of Open Source platforms doing great raster analysis at scale that we have collaborated so I think as use cases clear out more you will see more connections there

@gisdev-km right now we have 4 offices: NY,Madrid,Tartur (Estonia), and Washington DC

@jatorre hello! nice to _meet_ you :slightly_smiling_face: Now you mention the big challenge of going from a 10 people company to a 100 one, how are you dealing with that? What had to be changed to evolve your company culture as the team was bigger? Managing teams, people, resources, etc

and there are a many people working remotely from all over the place too. We work quite a lot distributed although there is a clear development hub in Madrid

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Does Carto sail their UC boat from Madrid? :slightly_smiling_face:

Regarding size @gisdev-km we are around 100 now. And for opportunities we are happy to talk to anybody anywhere :slightly_smiling_face:

@geokid yeah, big time. First I think the hardest is setting up management teams, we used to all sit in the same table, no meetings, just one table and all talking. With decentralization plus growing teams you start needing mid-management, communications strategies, coordination.... From a culture perspective I think the most important thing is ensuring information on the company flows right? you start getting lot ofs, I did not know that? or this is not my business, and this is scary and bad? you need people that really cares of the company as a whole and not just their work

@gisdev-km I found at I could actually sale from my home in Long Island City to our office in Bushwick! is that counts

The data observatory is a new thing, what drove that product development decision?

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@willcadell we are on the business of enabling people to take advantage from Location Data, in most cases that means mixing your own data with some other data. And because we can connect them by location that is the beauty of our industry. Now, finding data and preparing it for usage is one of the hardest part of most analysis. If we want to make people get more value from Location, data is critical

@jatorre is it difficult working next to such a handsome and talented community team in Brooklyn?

There is no doubt that understanding and aggregating open data is complex...

gosh @santiago I am not raising your salary and you know it :wink:

jaja

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are we likely to see carto provide open data hosting technology for cities / government?

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I like to think of the data observatory of the layer of information that will enable you to normalize your data by many different layers of information, providing you with contextualization you need to perfom spatial analysis

uhmm @willcadell not sure about that. I mean, we have cities like New York or Mexico who are alaready sharing loads of open data with CARTO. But I dont think it will be on the form of open data portals, but more in concrete applications that help you do something with it. It is great to have the data open and available for bulk download, but there is a lot of other ways that Open Data, and Transparent governments can communicate with citizens

coolio!

for example, in NYC they are cutting the L train in 2018 for some reparations. It is great if the city publishes not only the data that powers their analysis, but the analysis themselves so citizens can understand them. That is a level of transparency that I think is still missing. Like, why did you take this decission, let me show you in an effective way...

@jatorre is it true that you still do some coding? how does it feel to be a CEO and be close to the metal?

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hehe, what is more amazing is that our own CTO @javisantana trolls you in an AMA!! :wink:

@jatorre: I loved the analysis you guys did about the implications of that for people having to change their normal transit usage

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but I do code by the way! And love it

but none of my code gets into product these days (for good reasons i guess)

I feel your pain

Thoughts on geojson no longer supporting crs?

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CARTO has gone through a big brand update and a UI change recently? what drove these things to happen at the same time?

thats a sofball I guess @robodonut ? I do prefer it without the CRS, and always Lon,Lat

@jatorre is it your new product builder a powerful and solid alternative vs other competitors like Mapbox?

One last question @jatorre: In the projects that I work on, I'm the sole developer. I need to support desktop and mobile users, and I feel like the mobile SDK's are definitely some invaluable tools I need to learn, but I feel like there's no time. Do I have to pick one or the other, or is that where things are going?

5 minute warning for official end. If @jatorre would like to continue past he is free to do so.

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@geokid I think answer that before but I dont see the Builder as an alternative to Mapbox. In fact you can use them together. We are focus on enabling users to analyze and get value from their location data. And our target users are not mainly developers, but analysts that need to create location apps to help organizations take decissions. We do have some overlapping, but really Mapbox and CARTO are not really competitors in that sense

A few years ago I installed CartoDB on a server at work. We all had a good laugh at needing to use apt, gem, npm, pip, git clone AND make to get everything put together (and on a recommended Ubuntu 12.04) ? is it ever going to get simpler to make Carto run on your own server?

hey @max yes right now native mobile development is quite separated from the web. There are different projects trying to simplify this making a bridge between the two, but honestly probably still not close. On the other hand adaptive web for mobile support can be quite ok for most projects and I think that is something that CARTO can help you with

in the future we might look at bridging even more this world of mobile and web, so you can design apps in Builder and then deploy on the web or on Mobile, but thats not in the immediate roadmap

@stuporglue: if you're willing to deal with docker: https://github.com/chriswhong/docker-cartodb

@stuporglue hope so! Have you checked some of the Docker?

#dockerAllTheThings

I haven?t needed a local Carto recently, so I?m out of date with the current Docker images, but IIRC, back in the day there were a bunch of outdated Docker (or maybe VVV?) images. If there are up to date Docker images these days, then that?d be a good choice

now, running CARTO at scale with high perfromance and High availability can be tricky, and that is part of our cloud offering of course. So for small projects in organizations with good systems capacity Open Source might be a good option for production. On other cases organizations prefer to pay for the support and us providing it as a service.

Send a message to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cartodb

Ok everybody thanks for all your questions. If you have any more feel free to contact me through here or at the #carto channel. Hope you guys have a great day, and looking forward to lots of Blue Maps in todays election! Cheers

Thanks @jatorre

Thanks @jatorre much appreciated!

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@stuporglue we know installing carto is a pain but we keep updated documentation to install it http://cartodb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

not only installing but configuration and some other handy stuff

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I?ll just point out its mad skillz to do a text based AMA in a language that is not your first! :parrot:

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Thanks for doing the AMA today @jatorre

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Looks like we had a lot of lurkers, but there were definitely some good questions in here. We?ll leave the channel open for a few days for everyone to go over. But thanks again and hopefully we?ll see you around in The Spatial Community

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We will pull the log and post up on http://thespatialcommunity.org in the next day or so.

Thank you @jatorre for your time today!

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