The future of sophisticated and beautiful web maps is looking rosy following the CARTO Locations conference in Madrid.

NGIS sent two people – Executive Director Richard Bentley and Product Lead Adam Mullett – to the conference on April 19-20 where Location Intelligence platform creators CARTO showed off their road map and their product updates.

The three main take aways from the conference are: the data streams, Airship design library and the launch of vector tiles.

Data streams – use rich premium data sets in your map

CARTO is introducing premium data sets into their Data Observatory product, complementing the existing Census data available there.

Vodafone data is being used globally to give companies an idea of foot traffic and patronage. Being able to ask questions about where clients come from and go to after visiting your location can help you build a better experience for them or market to your audience more effectively.

Tom Tom provides travel time data and routing information for heavy vehicles and other cars with their network of sensors.

Digital Globe incorporate their data into the Data Observatory so you can get a wealth of information like feature count on vehicles and buildings, or to monitor remote areas.

Credit card data with purchase type, amount, times and more will be available in the near future. CARTO will be making an announcement of a data partner in this space at the end of May.

Waze data can now also be used by cities and councils for free by incorporating it into CARTO’s product Traffico, which shows where congestion is high.

Airship design library – build more beautiful products

Design is a key differentiator for CARTO in the spatial market place and to help developers bring this same level of finesse to their products, a new design library has been open sourced. Airship is a collection of code snippets that will supercharge developers by giving them pre-styled, configurable widgets they can use to make their application beautiful and consistent.

Check out the CARTO Airship github to download all the widgets and start building beautiful maps.

Vector tiles

CARTO’s new vector library brings quick and dynamic mapping to applications you build. CARTO engine can now serve vector tiles which will make quicker and more animated maps that can have features manipulated on the client side. Maps with temporal data can be animated at up to 60 frames per second to tell stories of movement and change with points, lines and polygons.