This is our new mashup that has been submitted to Apps For Californians - a web application development contest focused on enhancing government transparency and services.

The map aims to geolocate social activity around universities and colleges in California. For this purpose, we have used the Foursquare API as well as public data provided by the State of California.

Social Map of California Colleges & Universities displays online social activity around each of the geolocated educational institutions and enables you to view most popular places among the students. To see Foursquare check-ins the user should select the needed institution on the map and click on its marker.

The map also offers a statistics tool to monitor recent data (2010) on the student population of each institution (for colleges only), including age, ethnicity and gender of members.

Databases and APIs used for the map:

- Geographic Data from data.ca.gov:

• Community Colleges - CA.gov
• Independent Colleges - CA.gov
• State Universities - CA.gov
• Universities of California - CA.gov

- Statistical data of California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office
- Google Maps API
- Foursquare API

Features:

- Radius of specified distance (km) around each map marker
- Foursquare check-ins by the students of each institution

Zuckerberg & Co have finally unveiled Places, their new geolocation check-in service.
Unfortunately, for now Places is only available in the US. So, at the moment our judgment can only be based on detailed (but usually subjective) publications about this service. Thus, there is a wealth of articles castigating Facebook for their privacy policy (for Facebook’s opponents here are some scathing publications like Facebook Places: Your Friends Are Here, But What About Your Privacy? or Privacy Group Voices Concerns About Facebook Places ).
However, we decided to stay unprejudiced and not to plunge into the sea of criticism for the new Facebook's creation. In brief, we tried to sum up what you can really do with Facebook Places:

It seems that Places is using both Google Maps and Bing Maps.
The application allows you to:

- Check-in to different venues
- See who is in your neighborhood ("Here Now" feature)
- Get notifications when your friends check in your proximity
- Tag photos and friends while checking into locations (do not worry! You can remove tags if you wish)
- Create a news feed item showing your check-in location

And even though Facebook’s privacy controls are far from being perfect, the good point of Places is that, when you start checking in, the default setting enables ONLY your friends to see your activity! Plus, you are free to customize your privacy settings by selecting the closest friends who will have the privilege to view your location data.

Hopefully we could soon test out Places ourselves. And who knows, maybe the Places feature will soon be added to our Mapize platform!

This week, at the CampusPlex we’ve had the honor of welcoming Roxanne Varza from TechCrunch France. For those who do not know, TechCrunch is one of the biggest blogs on Web 2.0 and technology news worldwide.

The goal of Roxanne's visit was to learn more about the tech/startup activity in Corsica, with the CampusPlex being the top item on her agenda.


Today, in her article on TechCrunch Europe, Roxanne briefed on outcome of this visit. And we were really happy to see that this article highlighted our Mapize mapping platform among other great CampusPlex’s projects (WMaker and DuoApps ).

Thank you so much for your appreciation!

Yet, it’s not the first publication about us this summer: two weeks ago we made the headline of Nestoria Australia blog. Nestoria is a British vertical search engine for real estate, now available in almost all European countries.

Nestoria Australia published the big interview with Mapize’s team in their regular column, where they interview thought-leaders from the realm of internet technology and new media businesses.

Hopefully, these publications will help boost interest in our activity and push our solution forward!

Russia is being ravaged by hundreds of forest and peat-bog fires as the nation battles against record heat. Today the death toll from wildfires reaches 50.

A lot of maps locating the fires have been created in order to inform people about the current situation and track the new hotbeds of fire.

Russian-Fires built a map aimed at showing actual fires, blocked roads but above all helping find fire aid points, as well as temporary accommodation for fire victims.

All the mapped data is classified into different categories. For example, to find information about people willing to help you can choose the category Want to Help in the right-side sidebar, then select the needed sub-category (Non-food Items, Transport, Food, Money etc).

To view data for different periods of time you can use either the time-line or the chronological list of fires above the map.

Personally, I can imagine how terrible the situation is: my parents have nearly lost their country house (dacha) in a forest fire near Voronezh, Southern Russia. It was saved by a miracle, just because the wind suddenly changed direction.

We’ve mapped twice the World’s Billionaires ranking by Forbes (2009 and 2010 ). And now Challenges magazine has released the 2010 France’s biggest fortunes list.

This subject has never left us cold, and our new map features France’s Richest People 2010 as estimated by Challenges.
514 billionaires and millionaires from all over France (individuals and families) have been located on the map to let you easily find more information about each of them. The map’s information windows contain some personal data about the wealthiest people in France (position on the list, net worth, type of business, company address etc).

Have a look at our map, may be you’ll find yourself there:)

I’ve just found a great map and I’d like to share it with you.

The Australia Council that supports Australian artists to create, present and publish their work provided a new awesome way to explore the arts. Nearly 200 art companies currently funded by the Australia Council have been mapped to give visitors a global view of their territorial ranking (both Google Maps and Google Earth views are provided).

To explore the map you need to select the type of art project and the region of Australia you are interested in. Or you can just select the tour option and the flying tour will be created to show you all the companies one by one. The nice red kangaroo map markers provide information windows with each company's details, including the latest digital stories and updates created by the companies.

It’s a really smart way to promote art projects!

This is a very special month for us here at Mapize. Last week, our location-based solution for creating customizable and embeddable maps was finally kicked off!

Today Mapize is mainly a social mapping tool that enables you to create and customize your own maps based on the most popular social services such as Twitter and Foursquare. With Mapize, anyone can map their updates and check-ins and share them with other people through a blog or website. Very soon new features will be added to let you map your Facebook friends and your favorite Youtube videos!

With the beta version of Mapize you can build and embed to your website or blog the maps displaying:

- Your own content (an unlimited number of markers are at your disposal)
- Geotagged tweets of your followers
- Geotagged tweets of your Twitter friends
- Your favorite hashtags
- Your Foursquare check-ins

Mapize offers multiple options to customize your map’s design and add numerous features, in accordance with your needs.

Though hardly perfect, Mapize is constantly evolving, with a lot of new useful map features that will be integrated in the weeks to come.

So, come to test Mapize and create your own maps FOR FREE at http://www.mapize.com/ !

All your comments and suggestions are highly welcome!

A couple of weeks ago, we discovered an interesting competition run on the Sports Facebook Page to encourage football fans worldwide to support their teams by voting for their countries.

This idea has inspired us to create a map devoted to the 2010 FIFA World Cup that will start on June 11th in South Africa and will be the culmination of a qualification process that began in August 2007.

The map involves 32 countries. Each marker shows the number of fans who have voted for this country. For example, you can see that Chile has the most passionate football fans (more than 405, 000 votes!). Each marker includes an information window with two tabs: Country and Matches. It shows some country stats, such as internet population, FIFA ranking, World Cup Victories and 2010 World Cup matches.

The map also displays the 10 stadiums in South Africa that will host the World Cup. Information windows contain stadium photos and details (name, city, construction type, completion date and gross capacity).

You can view as well the World Cup related tweets and see people around the world talking about this event.
Want to support your team? Be active, vote for your country and see the overall results on the 2010 FIFA World Cup Map !

If you like our map, just click on the Facebook button on the map and join our community.

Do you want to win an iPad?
Well, If you are interested, we invite you to take part in our upcoming contest that will mark the launch of the beta for our Mapize mapping platform. And the prize will be none other than your very own iPad!
For a detailed description of the contest, follow our updates on Facebook. We will give you more information about the rules and dates very soon.

Last week we took part in the Annual Agriculture Fair staging various Corsican small and medium agricultural producers, including horticultural growers and exporters.

The event was organized by the CREPAC (Association aimed at encouraging and promoting local agriculture) with the purpose of empowering small and medium level private growers to play a vital role in regional economy.

At this fair we presented our new map localizing different Rural Tourism Routes and various growers and manufacturers (wine, cheese, sausages, sculpture, jewelry etc.) in Corsica: http://map.terragir.tv/

The map enables visitors to Corsica to easily find hotels, inns and local growers' shops in different Corsican regions. The information windows give addresses, contact information and description of each point. The map is made with the use of the Google Earth Plug-in, which allows to view the mountain relief by choosing the Earth tab.
And very soon Rural Routes in Sardinia, Liguria and Toscana will also be added to the map.

I’ve already touched upon the tips and tricks for business Facebook fan pages. As mentioned earlier, we've also decided to create the Facebook fan page for Mapize, which would help us create our own community and keep our visitors in the loop of the latest company news and upcoming events as well as hold various map-related contests and games.
To make our entrance into Facebook we’ve checked out the already existing best practices and have chosen those which better corresponded to our targets.

Now we are happy to share with you some tips that we used to create our own Mapize Facebook Fan page. Hopefully, you’ll find this information useful.

To catch visitors’ attention at once and provide better visibility of our brand we used a 200 x 600 pixel logo for our profile, which is much larger than the standard profile picture.

While there are numerous tips and applications to leverage your brand on Facebook, it’s not so easy to find an optimal way to drive visitors to your fan page without overcharging your Wall with useless or cumbersome data. To avoid this situation we set up the tab Mapize as a landing page, i.e. the space our new visitors will view first when they enter our fan page. And people who already like our page will land directly on the Page Wall.
We’ve also added the large picture and Mapize logo to let new visitors immediately discover our company’s identity and the comments box to let them leave comments directly on the landing page.
To set up the landing page, click on ‘Edit Page’ > ‘Wall Settings’ > then on ‘Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else’ chose the tab which you want to present first when new users enter your Facebook page.

To enable ourselves using original tabs we added to our fan page the Static FBML application. This app allows to replace or supplement traditional tabs (Info, Photos etc.) with more personalized ones.
Thus, we created a Video tab to present the music videos for our maps, which will help our visitors discover our maps and better understand how they can use them.
For a start we added 3 videos illustrating our: Forbes Billionaires Map, Darwin Bus Map and Book Map. And of course we will add more maps in the course of time.
As the page has just been published and there's not enough information, we decided to connect it to our blog, so that visitors could get a general idea of our activity. Within the next few days, we will add the Contest tab, which will enable us to build diverse mapping contests.
We’ll also add the Twitter tab to let people follow our Twitter updates.

The Poll application allows to get feedback from your visitors. A poll can be a casual way to get a read from your fans about a new product, a new page design, or your business in general.
You should simply ask your burning question in the poll settings. And our first question was: What kind of map would you like to see next?
We’ve chosen to publish our polls to the custom tab but it also can be popped into your left-hand navigation where visitors can click anytime they come to your Page.

Certainly, we are only beginners and have a lot of things to learn, but my guess is that the best way to make your page engaging is to post interesting content and keep the conversation going with your fans! :)