Felt
felt.com
felt.com
Even renders and pictures require attribution.
So if a journalist makes a screenshot of a website that uses Felt, they would have to have a text like ...
"Image courtesy of SomeSite with an image courtesy of Felt with an image courtesy of Mapbox with an image courtesy of OpenStreetMap?"
.... under the image?
> It has no real attribution when opened on a mobile or when browser window is resized to a smaller one.
By contrast, Mapbox ask for a credit as part of a commercial agreement, which by definition can be negotiated away. I guarantee if you call up Mapbox and offer them enough money, they’ll flex on their logo requirement. There is simply no legal way to do that with OSM.
Instructions unclear, I'm broke.
Money might not buy happiness but it buys an awful lot of power.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/16/mcdonalds-settles-discrimina...
https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/operations/mcdonald...
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/former-mcdonalds-workers...
The oldest of these is from end of last year.
Edit: tone down phrasing
It's real good, and a good example of big corporations sometimes backing off, however unwillingly.
There’s also little benefit to them, which makes it even more pointless.
That is of course more about journalistic standards and good practice. In terms of the law, IANAL but I don't think attribution is strictly required for Fair Use usage (e.g. reportage). Only for functional usage (e.g. providing maps to be used as maps).
I don't have a conclusion from this, and if you're going to use something that requires attribution you should attribute. Maybe we just need better ways of giving that attribution. It's certainly easier in an interactive medium, with hyperlinks and collapsable sections than on paper.
For practical functional applications, 3 layers seems high, and potentially a sign of over-engineering.
To get a little more technical about our hypothetical:
- I've used Mapbox in the past, and they included (at the time) a succint dual-attribution overlay for themselves and OSM as part of their APIs. It was well-designed and baked in (nothing for me to do).
- If I were to then take my own application and offer it as a service for others to embed:
1. There's a strong likelihood I'm offering a commercial service so attribution may not be required for my layer (provided service-charges covering white-labelling)
2. If I am requiring attribution, it might make sense for me to invest in direct OSM usage & cut out the Mapbox middleman.
3. If not, it certainly seems like my added layer would be the absolute extreme (and baking in a well-made 3-component attribution would be challenging but not insurmountable).
>Other than Your Content (as defined below), all Content displayed on the site or accessible through the Services, including text, images, maps, software or source code, are the property of Felt and/or third parties and are protected by United States and international intellectual property laws. Logos and product names appearing on or in connection with the Services are proprietary to Felt or our licensors. You may not remove any proprietary notices or product identification labels from the Services.
Small print about small print.
That's mostly because I think (as they also must) that "making maps" is something that everyone does (in our heads; verbally; on the back of scrap paper; on random car-floor cardboard tacked to trailhead signs) but that few easily-accessible software tools have ever tried to facilitate digitally.
I'm interested mostly in the user-experience they've created to add our "human effects" to an "existing" map (like notes, relevant points, lines, directions). I really am drawn to it.
They're putting a lot of energy into the data-layer side of things, which I think is admirable considering the complexity, and seem to be nailing it. I'm not sure how folks will use those things, since I don't think our mental maps often require additional data.
I'll also add that their curated set of example uses is an excellent model for how to show people how to use a product that they might otherwise have no idea what to do with.
Even in an office environment I think they're biggest competitor is going to be MSPaint(3D)
The evacuation plans in my (1000+ employee) company are still just building control plans that have been printed out on A3 and marked with a sharpie.
Qgis is a bare minimum to make a decent map.
A "friendly relationship" of customers with salespeople, perhaps. And familiarity with software that's used in GIS courses at universities.
Their pro software and online services have kept up with the times, you can do almost anything in the program as well. And there’s multiple ways to do each thing. It also has its own internal logic that people get used to like photoshop.
I believe it’s a private company too which means they aren’t always pleasing shareholders
A few reasons:
1.) many geotech companies require on premise installations because they want control of their data and/or the internet quality at remote sites is poor. This means that a SaaS solution is a non-starter.
2.) Most geotechs are already familiar with Arc tools due to Arc’s aggressive marketing to universities
3.) Arc is a swiss army knife which can do most things “good enough”. For most businesses Arc can do what they want out of the box. Products like felt only have 1/10th or less of the functionality as Arc.
We are in the process of replacing Arc with our own custom platform at my company. If you are a heavy user of Arc you quickly outgrow the capabilities of the system. We want to serve petabytes of geotechnical data, and Arc quickly starts to choke on data sizes that large. The operational work of keeping Arc up and running smoothly is also a major headache since you don’t have access to the source code and the error messages in Arc are very poor which means you rely on ESRI support a lot.
I think Felt is taking the winning approach - to enlarge the market by making map making possible for everyone and making it be online-first.
I've been playing with https://clockworkmicro.com/ to make layers in my spatial database viewable by others, but it requires some GIS knowledge and familiarity with databases (unlike Felt).
""" Where typical internet maps take 30+ seconds to load after each pan and zoom """
What typical maps are the talking about?
https://felt.com/map/San-Diego-Zoo-Virtual-Tour-LC3QHLPxR4yw...
I just loaded this big map on a pixel 4a and while it was laggy, it still responded and didn't crash
I tried it in Safari on my i9 late-2019 MBP and (after dismissing the warning message) I was barely able to move around.
It would likely be more performant if the map view was a single canvas and panning, segmentation and so on was done in a buffer and rendered to the canvas by blitting the pre-rendered sections, or something along those lines. Maybe even rendering the sections to WebGL textures and using a WebGL context for the canvas.
But something fun to notice with Felt is that the rendering library (LeafletJS) is using transform3d to do 2d translations (instead of just using translate), so you may wonder "why?" At least in Chrome (and it seems in Safari) if you use transform3d the browser is more likely to keep the div in its own layer. This will reduce a lot of the paint/compositing time, and make the frame rate dramatically better. Of course in this case the micro-optimizations are irrelevant in comparison to Felt's JS performance problems (which on my machine appears to be due to projecting 2000 points from lat/lng space to pixel space every frame.) Choosing to project points every frame is super confusing because the whole point of the translate/transform3d optimization is to avoid having to recalculate pixel space during the latency-sensitive pan interaction. Odd.
On the Appalachian Trail map the Title of the Legend is "Bathymetry". Something tells me that is not right. Global warming must be a bigger problem for the east coast than I had been misled to expect.
The map of community solar proposals also has a problem in the legend. All the line sizes for the transmission capacity players are identical in the legend even though they are graduated sizes on the map.
In addition, there actually end up being two map legends as you can see in the Appalachian Trip planner. The first one is tied to the base map and the symbology fits for the base map. You need to zoom in to see any Campground or Trailhead points since they are features common to the National Parks along the route. The second one is the user added note with Planned Stops and Estimated Date.
Points associated with the second legend (or note or whatever) are all you see at the initial scale. This might be confusing for some users who would expect all map layers to belong to one legend so this should be clarified.
With these in mind, it would pay off for them to examine their Legend tools so that they can become legendarily good because right now they serve as a perfect example of how not to do a map legend. They are supposed to convey useful information that aids visual interpretation of map features and layers.
I agree that the layer list used to compose the map ought to be separate from the map legend.
Why are maps so hard to make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31587950 - June 2022 (96 comments)
Nobody just clicking around is likely to buy a sub just for kicks.
Especially at the beginning when you are still refining your product / figure out a business model. Maybe further down the line they have a freemium version but it's probably not what you should start with if you are aiming for paying customers giving feedback.
What typical internet maps are they using?
Government? No thanks! Disrupting government contracts must be the last thing on the list of things to conquer. You’ll win the prize eventually but they are the end game big boss that you get just after you get your SOC2 etc.
Mining? Landing a big mining or mineral extraction contract seems like it could be a huge deal. There’s a lot of money in that industry (eg mining, ahem, oil) so I suspect they have their own in house cartogeniuses. Selling mapping software to mining corporations would be a bit like selling docker consulting to Google, I’m guessing.
Agriculture? Small to medium ag would be a nice market to go after. Maybe even target one of the other ag b2bs rather than selling to ag directly. Exit via John Deere acquihire!
Ecology? Academia? If Elsevier are anything to go by then there’s a fair bit of cash there to be spent on institutional software. Maybe you can do a deal with a whole University to provide felt licenses to all staff and students?
On that last point, remember how Facebook started out by targeting college kids? Is there a business pattern for pushing gratis software tools to undergrads so that they then preach them to their new bosses as new hires once they graduate? It sounds so obvious but are there good examples of it other than school kids learning MS Office? “Hey I loved using Felt for my undergrad dissertation — let’s use it here, at my new mining job?!”
Good luck, Felt!
Hahahaha no.
Imagine being a cash strapped county and paying 6 figures for a software license to a REST API and then having to become a tiny dev shop just to start delivering your generic pothole reporting app to web users.
Been there, done that. We have developed a similar product for WHO and ILO in Geneva: interactive maps with their data (tons of it). Put my own money into development based on their enthusiastic feedback among heads of departments.
Well, enthusiastic feedback is all we've got. Two years is not enough to run the contract by legal and financial depts and nowhere even close to get any - any - signed paper.
A generation of CS students learned to program in Java on Solaris machines subsidized by Sun.
Does anyone on the team watch HN? Mind chipping in a thought?
Esri also have a vast array of products for many niche industries.
This product is cool, and I'm sure Felt have given careful consideration to how they plan to strategically differentiate from both Esri and open source solutions.
Datawrapper has done a nice job. This feels like that to me. Annotated maps, otherwise it’s easy enough to use mapbox or osm yourself to tell your own story.
Beating Esri is a lofty goal. Aside from the aforementioned core tech, they are extremely entrenched and scaled in basically all horizontals, and have verticals for each, plus a big partner network.
I think that in order to "beat" Esri, you'd have to beat them in all these different spaces, horizontally and vertically. There is some low hanging fruit there technically, IMHO, but the picture bigger is that it's going to take a ton of sales people over many years to actually disrupt.
I think a long-term technical strategy for a scrappy startup to be looked at as an "Esri-beater" would be to start with ArcGIS Online and build inroads from there. There are weak points there in the business response to the licensing evolution, the tech, and the UX/DX.
Just my 2c.
I used to walk by his office and find large integrals on his whiteboard, or see him working on his latest project with Mathematica and his code editor.
Esri is an interesting company to me. Always been slightly fascinated by it. One of the older software companies and still privately owned. I spent a good chunk of my early career both aligning and competing with it.
My colleague and I ran into Jack once. Two random nobodies, visiting campus for obscure reasons, running into the main building to escape the random rain storm, and he opens the door to let us in.
Knew exactly why we were there, and asked us what we thought of AWAB before stating something to the effect of: "I don't know what we've been doing all these years. People don't want to buy our stuff and then have to learn to write code, they just want to make maps."
I'm convinced that's the key to the next world-eating web mapping company: stop forcing non-technical orgs to have to become technical orgs with technical staff just to solve simple spatial problems. It's orthogonal to their competencies and primary directives.
Easier said than done of course.
P.s. I know (of) who you are referring to btw, and he's somewhat of a legend, even outside Redlands.
Phew is that a bit of an understatement. Where I work would love a proper competitor to it, so I definitely agree with your assessment as to the approach. Would be amazing to see Felt (or someone) tackle it.
Wish you the best guys, this industry needs a lot of innovation.
Especially if it's a company with multiple employees that probably don't sit around and do nothing all day.
$20m is also not that much, mapbox raised 10x that amount and still struggles to find customers.
We have sales people and analysts that just need to make a basic map, call out some data points, and make it look good. Feels like Felt is a great tool for that.
We have larger needs where we need to do more complex analysis and visualize the relationships of larger data sets geographically - that's what we're looking to ArcGIS for.
It's been a bit of a search to find an affordable tool for the first use case and am glad to see someone in the space doing it.
Curious, is there anything else about your needs pushing you towards ArcGIS rather than, say, QGIS?
I was able to import all my existing NYC geo-points into Felt and quickly chart some itineraries from different sources. Way, way faster than Google Map.
Let's see how fast it will render once I'm on the ground in the city with mobile interent.
One major difference with Google Map is the lack of custom layers, but so far it hasn't been a problem.
This is my NYC 2022 trip map :) https://felt.com/map/New-York-2022-u7J1aE2ZSLOmdwCP4WGCOA
What seems to be missing from Felt is some interactivity to make this map useful. I can’t tap on a route to see it’s length it get it to open in google maps for routing. I can’t tap on a pin to get its address or get directions to it.
It’s just a zoom able picture, which isn’t a big payoff for all the effort needed to build the map.
I'm can't find any import function? (maybe I need the phone-app?)
It looks really nice, but I think the lack of custom layers makes it quite - well - lacking.
A simple feature which allowed to add an arbitrary OSM POI category as a layer (and selectively remove individual POIs) would've been very useful.
What I'm currently wanting to do is draw a circle that's e.g. 100 meters around a given latitude and longitude. Google maps doesn't let you do this. I could do it with Leaflet, but that would involve setting up a whole js app for something that is basically just a back of the envelope calculation. I have access to ArcGIS which I'm sure can do it, I guess I'll have to learn how to use it.
Also factors: where you draw the circle, because this matters depending on your choices of projections.
ArcGIS or GDAL or whatever can do the math for you, but there's still domain knowledge and careful tradeoffs involved in representing anything spatial and meeting actual IRL need. It's all relative (and a bit of a goddamned nightmare)
(src: I used to build spatial tools on ArcGIS)
I will probably not use it, but might be interested, if it had an API. From my [admittedly, cursory] examination, it does not appear to have an API.
I assume it uses OSM data? But maybe not, as I don't see any attributions on the maps.
Personally, I am a "cartophile." I love maps, and really enjoy using them.
I have heard some folks throw shade on MapBox, but it appears to be a pretty good system, from what I have seen.
There are plenty [1] of sites & apps (some quite large) that don't correctly attribute OSM data according to the legal requirements [2].
[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lacking_proper_attributi... [2]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
There's some overlap in features but certainly Radar Chat doesn't have any of the drawing functionality.
The Postman collection thing is something I've been seeing, recently. Great idea.
I also have had to make maps to print out for events… this may fit the use case there perfectly.
[0] give me a map, compass and tell me where I am and I’ll get to wherever I need to be day or night over any terrain—desert, jungle, woodlands, been there, done that.
I can’t find it now, but a while ago there was a post about map/data startups that basically boiled down to: Don’t.
The argument went like this:
People who want geospatial visualisations almost always want something custom.
Companies selling geospatial products believe that they can churn the data into “data layers” that serve “use cases” that mostly address this.
It’s always more work to work with a company to get the last mile of the custom use case… than it would have been to just do it yourself.
There aren’t that many paying customers.
…
I don’t know how true that is in reality, and the article was more nuanced than my dumb summary, but… really? A subscription product to annotate maps, which has built in “data layers” so “you don’t have to”?
Sounds very familiar.
In my own experience, either the product needed very little map features, and it didn't warrant paying in full just for that (I remember even live Google Maps integration being dismissed as "too costly" and moving to pre-rendered optimized maps).
Either we needed a lot more maps, and having full access to the underlying data made more sense to limit computational overhead and better adapt to our use case.
Basically map/location related features are hard and often costly, I expect companies to either avoid them completely or bite the bullet and go full in.
"It’s always more work to work with a company to get the last mile of the custom use case… than it would have been to just do it yourself."
This is true if all you need is a out of the box basemap with "data layers"
Many companies need to process data in real time or at least nightly to get it into a format that has all the information they need usually cross referenced and enhanced with multiple related data sources. These can be related via a primary key and simple or related via a simple or complex spatial relationship or spatial plus primary key relationships. This will require custom ETL pipelines that a utility company, for instance, doesn't have the in house expertise to create and maintain.
This also assumes you have the supporting elements already in place. Utilities often need to host data themselves for security or legacy reasons so they can't just use a cloud service. There are usually tools built on top of the data that need to be updated. A new geospatial system usually involves a lot more than just a new data layer. If that's all you need, then maybe these companies like felt are a good solution.
Felt seems to be primarily a visual map annotation tool ala building visualizations. I doubt the data part would need to be that complex and custom. It could be a generic 'view' layer providing just the top layer and leave the data sources wide open and flexible but for the current offering it makes sense it's building off a 'library' of sources.
Although every B2B product will have customers who demand startups be their personal software consultants. That doesn't always translate into a repeatable product.
The font, the color, the animation, the bar going across the top, who comes up with this?
Is there a need for clean custom components for app design development?
Also, check out the Twitter of Felt's lead designer for some of their process: https://twitter.com/lorenbaxter
I think this flow could be improved, perhaps with a demo account or such.
The videos make it pretty clear also, however.
Having said that, performance when creating my own map was fine. It's not a perfect fit for me, and I'll still be using mapbox for now. But I'll follow the progress of this for sure.
I'd like to be able to embed on my own site(s) without using an iframe. And I would love to be able to use images (like the animals around the world example) as a clickable map marker + popup that scales properly with zooming.
My first thought though when I saw this link was "Damn that's a valuable domain name". According to a couple of sources it's worth somewhere in the ballpark of $15-25k!
Each could have been something interesting, but disappointingly there is only one other "real" website: melt.com ("Cheesed to meet you!")
The use cases are niche and basically require adoption from institutions.
The business model of allowing individuals to use, and allowing them to share, seems like a loophole to me. Per their FAQ, paid model will be for team collabs, which I would think is even more niche.
Hopefully they know better about this space then me. Best of luck Felt!
0: https://feltmaps.notion.site/Privacy-Policy-69227ee23a8a48dc...
I'm asking, because I do a lot of stuff like that, and currently I'm just using Folium for whatever tasks I have at hand - but would love to try out felt if that's the case.
It happens with the other example maps, too.
how therefore am i supposed to find a place i’ve identified on google maps?
Another douchily obscure title on HN.
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