Last year, Umbrella Consulting was contracted to architect an API for walkscore.com to handle high volumes of requests (millions a day).

We decided to build it on the new Google AppEngine infrastructure, and were recently invited to speak at the annual Google I|O developer conference about the experience.

You can view the video at http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/AppEngineNittyGritty.html

The GeoDjango workshop presented by Josh Livni and Christopher Schmidt at the FOSS4G conference is now available online for your enjoyment: http://code.google.com/p/geodjango-basic-apps/wiki/FOSS4GWorkshop

Umbrella Consulting was recently contracted by the good folks at WalkScore to work with them as they created a detailed walkability ranking system for the top 40 cities in the nation.

This project entailed analyzing of millions of data points around the country, aggregating and analyzing summary statistics in PostGIS, and using software like Mapserver and Tilecache to create heatmap visualizations.

If you're coming to the FOSS4G conference this year, we'll be presenting a paper on the methodology.