Friends,
2020 ia drawing to a close, and so it’s a natural time to look back on what we accomplished in the pandemic year of 2020. As for everyone our plans were thrown into disarray by the pnademic and ensuing lockdowns. Still, we managed to accomplish quite a lot.
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We spent a lot of time this year on improving our website particularly our account dashboard, with the goal of making our service easier to use and allowing users more ability to make account changes themselves. Specifically we:
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allowed customers to edit their invoice addresses, see when they will next be billed, and specify an additional email address for billing related matters (detailed post).
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rolled out an improved design.
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provided more clarity around disabled API keys.
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launched better usage charts.
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made it simple for former customers to delete their payment details.
We welcome all suggestions for how we can further improve the account dashboard, and make interacting with our service even easier.
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We spent a fair chunk of time on improved security:
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you can now configure two-factor-authentication (2FA) for your account
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we no longer support unsafe TLS versions for HTTPS requests.
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we launched our security bounty program (detailed post).
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customers can now enable IP-restriction and set a CORS HTTP header.
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finally, we now require solving a CAPTCHA at signup to stop automated sign-ups.
We hope these efforts give customers continued confidence that privacy and security will remain a primary commitment going forward.
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We intensified our support for OpenStreetMap. We:
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were able to move our corporate membership of the OpenStreetMap Foundation from the Bronze to Silver tier.
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continued our long-standing tradition of an annual donation to HOT.
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began sponsoring paid development work on Nominatim, and provided servers and mentoring for the GSoC Nominatim project.
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launched a public mirror of the OSM planet file.
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On the business side of things we added the ability to make one-time purchases of our service. Many thanks to all the customers who took advantage of this new feature.
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We spent a lot of time on refining and enhancing our documentation and the tools for using our service. Specifically, we:
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launched our comprehensive guide to reverse geocoding.
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added SDKs for C, Clojure, ColdFusion, PostgreSQL, and TypeScript to go with the many other OpenCage API SDKs we already had (and continually improve).
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found the time to freshen up the blog.
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Finally, we moved Geomob, the geo event we organize, to an online format, and launched the Geomob podcast! We hope you can join us on January 13th at our first online event of 2021.
I doubt anyone will look back on 2020 as a “good” year, but I’m pleased we managed to significantly improve our service. Many thanks to everyone in the team and the broader geo community for their help.
Forward to a better 2021!
Ed (Freyfogle)