Andrei Taraschuk joins FortiusOne

I’m excited to announce that Andrei Taraschuk, from UMapper and AFComponents, has officially joined the FortiusOne engineering team. He will be head of our visualization development in building out Maker to encompass the capabilities we’ve been building into the underlying GeoCommons platform for the last few years.

I’ve been friends with Andrei through my work on Mapufacture and he has clearly done ground-breaking work in developing visualization and mapping platforms. He built AFComponents and developed the first ActionScript compatible mapping library for modern mapping providers such as Google, Microsoft, and others. This evolved into UMapper which continued to grow and add features for simple map creation and embedding that’s been used by numerous media and enterprises such as USA Today, National Geographic, and a place we’ve been featured as well, the Huffington Post.

As his role of head of visualization, Andrei will continuing to evolve our map, and non-cartographic, visualization components. We’ve worked with some of the best in the industry such as AxisMaps and Stamen Design, as well as the incredibly bright engineers at FortiusOne to develop some great capabilities you’ll be seeing soon. But we’re really excited about the ideas and energy that Andrei will be bringing to the team – so definitely expect some even more amazing things soon!