The London-based real-estate mapping start-up, Nestoria, which I mentioned some posts back, continues advancing steadily. They now cover the whole of the UK, have permalinks for given latitudes, longitudes and bounding boxes, offer the possibility to embed their maps elsewhere...

But one feature introduced today has just been announced at an event in the UK by Mikel Maron, geo-hacker behind Mapstraction, GeoRSS and other things: open maps in a commercial mashup!.



Look at this map here, encapsulated in an iframe with their code. It's in the Isle of Wight, in the southern coast of England, and although you may see the Googlemaps watermark, imagery is not Google's but from OSM (Open Street Map). They have mapped quite well that area, produced vectorial maps with the aggregated info, and those maps have been inserted like tiles into Nestoria. Looks as if a static and local bunch of map tiles is being called, instead of dynamic calls to some server, but, however, a nice achievement, which they explain in more detail in their blog. Great shot, Nestoria! (I am certainly sympathetic to them: one of the founders of the company behind is Javier Etxebeste, a Basque Internet entrepreneur, formerly director of Yahoo Europe).

Mikel Maron announces another achivement in his blog: a Mapstraction demo. One code, three mapping APIs. Fantastic.