Richard is right in that the Data Marketplace is the key as in my eyes the map in openstreetmap is misleading, it’s so much more than that. It is a huge geodata storage facility with a map front end.

Cloudmade can make their money by being the front end search engine to find and structure this messy and inconsistent data. I remember someone asking how do I find coordinates for all the train stations in Germany…well cloudmade will hopefully spit back at him the answer in whatever format he desires.

Openstreetmap is growing at a rate where a high percentage of fixed ‘things’ have been given coordinates and tagged, it just needs a Cloudmade to organise these into coherent spatial datasets.

patch.com suggests that the big guys are willing to go straight to the source. The little guys will buy from a third party, and in some niches that’ll work well (iPhone, most obviously). But though selling services to little guys will sustain a small company like Geofabrik, the margins and scale are probably too low for CloudMade.

CloudMade’s imminent Data Marketplace is an interesting answer: rather than selling the OSM data, sell data that works with it.

By way of comparison, no one confuses Red Hat and the Linux community.

This is what I was getting at. Not the demise of a product and its development as such, but of the creative, technical guidance of projects and services like OSM.

I’m thinking it was too time consuming and costly to get routing working well, especially in the States. After the Google Navigation a-bomb perhaps it didn’t seem to make much sense. They seem to be concentrating on the data store and sponsored POIs as the way to monetise CloudMade.

Steve and Nick are heavily involved in the governance of OSM (Foundation, SOTM) but less so in the technical aspects. Most of the improvements to the core OSM site in the last year have come either from CM’s London office or from Tom Hughes.

Though OSM is an international project, most of the development happens around London — I can’t see Kiev replacing this. And OSM is a very technocratic community. Devs are respected. Suits aren’t.

CM’s London office has also made Herculean efforts on data quality. Any improvements to the terrible TIGER data is largely down to these four guys. Giving this up is, brave, shall we say, bearing in mind the embryonic state of the OSM US community and the strides Google is making with its own US map.

It is indeed a recession and there was probably no immediate ROI on the London office. This makes short-term sense for CM’s balance sheet. But it slows the progress of OSM and long-term that is bad for CM.

I wonder at the VC exit strategy, too. Like you I think monetization is a long way off so my initial guess would have been – get bought by someone. Yahoo maybe. But the data is open, so CM only had two assets: the proprietary code for their webservices, which is not that remarkable, and their expertise, which was. Now they have lost much of that.

(As a soon to be ex CloudMade employee) The product development and operations is not affected, as it is based in the Ukraine office, which is staying open.
I am getting somewhere with the job hunt, which is good.

Of course, there’s been no official announcement on this yet so there’s a certain amount of assumption and surmise in trying to discern precisely what’s going on.

However I think that the closure of the London office won’t affect the product, at least not directly. Despite their announcement of their pricing policy recently I still don’t see a viable business and monetization model for Cloudmade and that’s the greatest shame of all of this.