If you’re a student,undergrad or into the field of research,then this online tool will prove quite useful to you.We’re talking about Up2maps.It’s a web based tool that lets you generate,publish and download reports that relates to world geographical locations in any sense.
At first,you get to see a wizard based approach to help you choose the appropriate options(ex. selecting regions or states within a country).Then,you just need to fill in require data as per your report requirements and get your thematic map ready to publish with all the colours & numbers in it.
For instance,if you want to create a geographical map that intuitively depicts established 3G networks in entire europe and further want to share the created map on your blog and even download it so as to embed it into a powerpoint presentation then this service will solve your purpose quite efficiently.For live examples,have a look at this and this.
Up2maps majorly targets students,researchers and Non-profit organisations.It uses ‘Google Maps’ to bring you the geographical data and blends with it,its core idea of creating customizable and embeddable maps through it.
The maps are not only created by the community but also shared to the community(when users publish maps,it gets automatically public to Up2maps community) and therefore there has been decent efforts to engage and involve the users(both creators and readers) by public voting(similar to Digg’s),comments etc
You can browse over 50 countries on Up2maps.Map images can be exported to image(.png format) to insert within presentations.Data can by uploaded by excel files or typed directly within the application.Electoral maps can be created by painting selected territories.Data can also be uploaded by zip/postal codes,administrative codes or territory names.
Based out of Barcelona(spain) and co-founded by Marc Mauri,Eduard Santamaria & Carlos Mauri,this service is serving FREE at the moment but Up2maps might start serving premium accounts(paid,of course) with more enterprise features for hardcore & more sophisticated map creation.
As ‘Google Maps’ is neatly integrated with the core service and the UI is nicely done as well,the service seems quite a decent one and some more features will make it a better deal for online users.
Also,the effective domain of Up2maps is quite limited(customized map based reports for students,researchers etc) and therefore they might have to be be patient enough for really encouraging response and keep pumping more features into the site for quite sometime.