The State of the Map US conference at the United Nations Headquarters is in NYC June 6-8. It’s not too late to sign up to attend—the deadline has been extended to Wednesday, June 3! As an incentive, we are highlighting the talks by your friends at Mapzen. You won’t want to miss Randy Meech speaking about businesses and OpenStreetMap on Sunday, June 7 at 3PM in CR3.

Does the OpenStreetMap community have a fraught relationship with businesses? Or have companies just been part of the community since the beginning? Are companies evil institutions that just want to steal all the data, benevolent entities that want to help and contribute, or something in between? We’ll review some of the key historical moments of OpenStreetMap and its company ecosystem to figure out how we got to today.

What was Cloudmade and why did so many early OpenStreetMap people work there? What about Skobbler, currently the biggest exit built on OpenStreetMap data? What was the deal with open MapQuest, their services and donations? Why did Steve Coast go to Microsoft, what about their major satellite imagery donation, and what are they doing with OpenStreetMap now? Why would Telenav acquire Skobbler and continue to be involved in the community? How about the rise of Mapbox as the most identifiable OpenStreetMap backed business?

Waze sold for $1 billion to Google. Is it possible for companies using OpenStreetMap to reach valuations like this? What do companies and their backers think of the license? OpenStreetMap is one of the four global map datasets, what kind of pressure, if any, will this put on the project?

Randy is CEO of Mapzen. Although Mapzen is just under two years old, he’s been working on the business side of open mapping for a while. In 2010 he launched MapQuest’s OpenStreetMap initiatives. He’s especially interested in how individuals and companies can work together on open data and software.