Backblaze Joins Foursquare, Wikipedia, and Apple in Moving to OpenStreetMap

April 12, 2012 by Andy Klein // Leave a comment

If you use the “Locate My Computer” feature of Backblaze Personal Backup, you can get a map of the current location of your lost or stolen computer. Beginning today, that map will be provided by OpenStreetMap, a collaborative project to create a free, editable map of the world released through an open content license.

What a great idea: crowd-sourced, open-source maps. The more we looked into this opportunity, the better it looked. When the time to renew our existing Google Maps license arrived, we joined Foursquare, Apple, and now Wikipedia in supporting the OpenStreetMap movement—a perfect fit for Backblaze.

So while we hope you will never have to use the “Locate My Computer” feature of Backblaze, if you do, the OpenStreetMap community will be there to help locate your system. Take a look…

OpenStreetMap of Backblaze office location

Google Map of Backblaze office location

About Andy Klein

Andy Klein is the Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller at Backblaze. He has over 25 years of experience in technology marketing and during that time, he has shared his expertise in cloud storage and computer security at events, symposiums, and panels at RSA, SNIA SDC, MIT, the Federal Trade Commission, and hundreds more. He currently writes and rants about drive stats, Storage Pods, cloud storage, and more.