So we’d like to announce that we’ve raised a financing round of like.. $ONE BILLION (cents), led by Balderton Capital (Bernard Liautaud) with participation from Connect Ventures (Bill Earner), Index Ventures (Robin Klein) and Greylock Partners (Laurel Bowden), as well as a number of angels.
We remain focused on building a great product and user experience, and expanding it to everywhere in the world where we can make a difference. We’re listening: tell us which city you’d like us to do next.
Cities are where we live, work, play and breathe. We want to get them right. And we recognise that the only way to do so in multiple places around the world is to empower the locals and give them tools. Help us save your city!
Oh, and we have to spend this $ somehow. We’re hiring!
Many Londoners (and now New Yorkers!) have come to trust Citymapper to figure out how to get where they’re going. However, when using other apps to find places to go, it would be handy to be able to get those places into Citymapper automatically. To help with that, we’ve opened things up so that any app or web developer can give their users a chance to jump straight to Citymapper directions with real-time departure information.
We’re happy to share the first two examples of this from our friends at Time Out and YPlan—here’s how they’ve integrated Citymapper into their apps:
Time Out has a long history of being the go-to guide to London events. They’ve just relaunched their iOS app with a lovely redesign, and they’ve added the ability to get directions to any venue in Citymapper:
YPlan is an app that helps their users discover, book in two taps and go see events happening the same night in London (and soon New York). Here’s how they’ve integrated Citymapper:
If you want to give your users the same handy access to Citymapper directions, here are the details!
Launching Citymapper from iOS and Android Apps
The Citymapper iOS and Android apps can be launched using a URL scheme that takes the user straight into directions to the specified destination. It goes like this:
If you’re writing a mobile web app, we’ve also got a version of this scheme for the web too. It’s exactly the same, except you start with http://citymapper.com instead of citymapper, like so:
This will bring the user to a web page that shows them the destination. If they’ve got the Citymapper native app, it’ll launch the user into directions in the app.
CMMapLauncher for iOS
Sometimes you just want to quickly add a “get directions” feature to your iOS app without spending a lot of time mucking about with URL parameter formatting. To help out with that, we put together a micro-library called CMMapLauncher that makes it easier to launch Citymapper, as well as Apple, Google, and several other mapping apps. You can get it here: CMMapLauncher on GitHub
The intent is to keep it small and simple so that you can use it by dropping a couple of source files into your project and adding a couple lines of code. If you know of other apps that can be launched to provide directions, we encourage you to share the details via pull request or raising an issue on the Github project.
If you’re using our URL scheme, or if you have ideas for other kinds of integrations with Citymapper, we’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at support@citymapper.com.
