Join The Global Online Map Making Competition: HERE Mapathon

HERE Mapathon – a global online map making competition, lets you tell your travel story to the world and compete for $10,000 USD in cash prizes and more.

We talked with Divya Mehra, Senior Product Marketing Manager at HERE Technologies, about the company’s initiatives including the HERE Mapathon.

Throughout history, location has played a key role in the development and progress of people and societies, and maps have been a big part of telling stories about the world.

Keep reading to learn how you can compete in the Mapathon and tell your travel story.

Hurry — applications close on November 10th.

What is the inspiration behind the HERE Mapathon?

We at HERE Technologies, a leader in the location and mapping space, are passionate about all things location. Making a map from geospatial data helps draw insights and tell interesting stories.

You can create your own custom maps and tell a powerful story connected to travel.

Our mission is to empower everyone to make use of location data to improve our understanding of the world we live in.

For this reason, we launched the HERE Mapathon challenge.

Tell us more about the Mapathon and how can Travel Massive members participate?

We invite people globally to participate in our virtual contest to make a map. Create unique travel maps either using your own data or publicly available data. Best of all, no technical skills are required. Even people without coding skills can make their own custom maps using our easy to use tool – HERE XYZ.

Your first challenge is to describe briefly what information you would like to visualize on your future map that could be beneficial for you, your travel community, your city or society at large. If you are selected, you’ll be guided by mentors to generate map(s) using HERE XYZ.

Participants of the challenge have a chance to win:

• $10,000 USD for the winner
• Total cash prizes of $20,000 USD
• Mentoring on how to make great maps

To get started, register for HERE Mapathon now. Registration closes November 3rd.

Do you have any examples of maps made with HERE XYZ?

One of my favorite maps is an immigration map where Designers at Stamen combined data from three different sources to create a worldwide map of immigration / emigration starting from 1990.

Putting data on a map is one thing, but one of the most valuable aspects of visualization is pulling data from multiple sources and breaking the resulting information free of databases and number charts.

Check out this map of bike infrastructure in the city of Chicago by neighborhood which can be useful to anyone planning on biking while in the Windy City.

Another handy map is from Boston where tourists and Bostonians can find the closest place to buy a bottle of wine without going too far.

Maps can be an invaluable medium to not only create great stories but also get information out to people that can be easily understood.

Tell us more about HERE Technologies.

We’ve been in the location business since the early 80s. We started as a paper maps company with a simple goal of digitizing mapping and pioneering in-car navigation systems. Now with 8,000 employees globally, we are focused on the concept of location and the potential it has to radically improve the way we do business, the way we get around and the way we live.

While you may not have heard of us, you are likely using our technology behind the scenes in some shape or form – whether it’s the package that gets delivered to your door or the navigation system in your car that gets you to your destination.

– Thanks, Divya for sharing your insights – we can’t wait to see the great travel related maps that we get from this community!

👉 Learn more about the HERE Mapathon and enter the contest by November 3rd. 

Connect with Divya and apply for the contest by November 10.