It was an exciting week! Virtually without any publicity, the website recorded more than 7000 hits (from 17 countries on 4 continents) in the first 24 hours. That was sufficient for our ISP, Fujitsu, to take notice of us, deciding to increase bandwidth and give us a chance. As a result, in the next few days we should start making available the first sets for free download. We will start from the South African mapset scale 1:250.000 and follow then with the South African series 1:50.000 by Province. We do have limitation in data storage, so we will rotate provinces weekly. Please remember: the objective is not to have everyone download indiscriminately everything, if you want a set rather purchase data on CD, cost will be a fraction of the connection cost.

We continue to seek sponsorships for the website: the end of the financial year is near, is everyone’s company in a tax loss position? Please spread the word around.

We are adding some pages which should address the many issues for which we received enquiries during the past week. One question we received repeatedly: where are the prices? If there is no price, then although the set is stored in the archive, it is not ready for public distribution yet. Reasons may be diverse: the set might have been priced, or it is not ready for distribution, or the author has not given authorization yet or … the set is not intended for public distribution at all. In the next few weeks the database will be modified to give reasons why some data is not yet available. Please be patient. MadMappers is a non-profit project based on voluntary work, please keep it in mind.

We also intend to start a new section “download of the week”: we will have there super-special stuff, keep your eyes open. In the meantime do not miss the “Gallery” where we are exhibiting interesting images: please contribute, show the world what MadMappers can do.

Finally: we have no experience on e-commerce. If you do please contact us for some advise. Some mapsets cannot be distributed unless we are able to collect some royalty fees.