About

MapBox lets you design fast and beautiful interactive maps and share them on the web and mobile devices. MapBox is the whole package for making maps, from the worldwide street-level basemap MapBox Streets - powered by OpenStreetMap - to the open source map design studio TileMill for making custom maps with any data set, to its cloud publishing platform built on Node.js. MapBox gives users extreme design control built on technology that can scale for the highest performance environments.

Our team

Our team includes some of the brightest and most dedicated cartographers, data analysts, and software engineers in the world. We are an open organization with a flat structure that maximizes creativity and collaboration. MapBox is a boot-strapped start-up project of Development Seed, a creative data visualization and mapping team based in Washington, DC.


Our technology

Our team works with several open source projects to develop innovative tools for publishing maps on the web. We work primarily in javascript, using Node.js for application development. In addition to TileMill and TileStream, the map server at the heart of the MapBox platform, we've released several open source projects on GitHub.

Mapnik is the rendering engine inside TileMill. It makes turning geographic data into tiled images fast and flexible, with support for rendering UTFGrid data.

We also contribute to the development of Modest Maps, a fast, light-weight javascript library for map interaction. Our Wax library extends the functionality of Modest Maps and makes it easy to use MapBox maps in a number of popular map libraries, like LeafLet.js, Google Maps API, Polymaps, and Open Layers.

We developed the MBTiles file format specification for map tile storage to enable simple transport and management of millions of map image tiles and interactivity data grids. MBTiles are at the core of TileMill exports and the MapBox platform's custom map publishing service, and these SQLite-based files are also supported in many 3rd-party applications.

For a complete overview, see the MapBox Tour.