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CloudMine Introduces Geospatial Object Querying (cloudmine.me)
51 points by mweil on Jan 16, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



Is this the Geolocation API the Marauder's Map team at PennApps used this to build a virtual Marauder's Map? If so, now it suddenly makes sense how they had time to make the awesome UI design. I definitely agree on the feedback looking for examples. I'd love to see some open source Cloudmine apps.


It is indeed! Marauder's Map runs on CloudMine.


I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what CloudMine is. It looks like a server-side object store that also lets you execute server-side code, is that right? Is there a sample use case somewhere that I missed?


Right now, those are the essentials. Those two things are huge barriers to entry for many people trying to write mobile apps, and people love when we do it for them. Right now we are trying to cover our bases with the basic things that almost all mobile apps need, and then we will start exploring more exotic offerings. Keep on the lookout!

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us directly at team at cloudmine dot me.


Very neat! Had no idea about CloudMine before, but always happy to see alternatives to Parse and whatever other mobile backend service providers there are out there.

Congrats!


Thanks! Glad you know about us now. One of our big differences from Parse is our focus on server-side requirements as well as client-side. Case in point, our server side code execution environment. Check it out if you're interested. http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/15748285350/server-side-superp...


mweil, I just spent 10 minutes on your website, and I still am finding it very difficult to understand what it is you do.

Some tangible examples would really help prospective visitors. I remember seeing the site before in an article on TechCrunch and thinking exactly the same. The article on TechCrunch explains what it is that you do, a lot better than your examples.

I don't want to "Get Started" in order to have to figure out how your product can help.

I'm in the need for a mobile port of my application, so I really would like to see all of the potential offerings that are out there, but CloudMine has fallen way short on being able to explain what it is that you do? </trying to be constructive criticism - so don't take it the wrong way>.

The site looks good though :)


We've gotten a lot of great feedback about the copy on our website, and we know it definitely has room for improvement. It's in the works. :)

In the meantime, there are a few examples in our other blog posts that you could take a look at. Also feel free to email us directly (team at cloudmine dot me) if you have any specific questions and I'd be glad to explain our offerings in more detail.


Looks neat. No storage costs? Is there a catch on some size limits somewhere? I looked through the API docs but didn't see any.

Point storage with radius queries are nice and all, but I'd love to find a cloud storage provider that stored polygons and took polygons as queries, and had pay only for what you use.


You got it! No storage costs. We have a soft limit of 20k per object, but I doubt many people are going to come close to brushing that. And it's all free right now anyway.

Someone just tweeted at us earlier about GeoJSON (http://geojson.org/) which looks pretty awesome for storing polygon data. It sparked a conversation internally about a feature like that, especially since SimpleGeo (which offered that, I believe) is gone.

That point aside, geofencing queries are coming soon. That means that instead of just giving a center point and radius in your query, you can query with a polygon defined by arbitrary points and we will return your objects that exist inside that shape. Perhaps that could hold you over for the time being?


I want to do intersections of polygons - think "what neighborhoods have overlap with this political district." Many systems seem to have one but not the other, i.e. "store points, query by polygon", or "store polygons, query by point(and maybe radius)".

Storing polygons is probably key - if there's a query-by-radius or bounding box I can make an enclosing circle for my query and then do my own intersection tests with my query polygon.


With the demise of SimpleGeo this is a welcome addition, look forward to trying it out


Glad to see that you guys finally got that in. Nice work!


Congrats guys! Best of luck.




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