The site fails to achieve the goal of enticing contribution - the only option to actually contribute is a link to the 'missions' page that has only a single mission regarding Bolivia that doesn't interest me at all.
Furthermore, dedicated crawler isn't needed in many smaller (or more centralised/regulated?) markets where there are only a few players. E.g. in Latvia there are less than 30 credit institutions, and as the published data is freeform, not machine readable (http://fktk.lv/en/market/credit_institutions/banks1/ etc), then simply copy/pasting the info would be much quicker than testing a scraper.
So tangential, but germane: What if anything have you learned about all the banker deaths in the last ~24 months. Do you think, as some do, that its just given the population-size of the banking sector, these deaths are all normal? Or do you think there is a wider story here? Or do you not know what I am talking about? [1]
[1]This is not an authoritative list, and I have never read this particular site, but its one of the first on google: http://www.hangthebankers.com/48-suspicious-banking-deaths/
One of those wrinkles is the mobile experience of your site, which is currently almost unusable - a big chunk of navigation always taking up the top 3/4 of the screen, and then a tiny fraction of scrollable content.
Yep, we know!
Re:Map the Banks
by moriokumura on Monday December 15, 2014 @09:58PM
(#8755664)
What' the source of world map?
I'm surprised you are listing Somaliland and Northern Cyprus as an independent nation, but not listing some little nations. (e.g. Vatican, Andorra)
can you explain more about how you want "coders" to do "missions", but you're charging 20k/yr for access to part of the data, and you have an obnoxiously low rate limit? are you bloomberg? I think we should all stick with quandl for now. But seriously though, it's disingenuous to brand yourself as "open data" but not offer bulk downloads and a realistic API limit.
I'd like to follow you somehow (no time like the future!), but no email signup and no sign of twitter. Suggestions?
We're @opencorporates on twitter, and I'll make sure we add a link to that from mapthebanks.com later today.
I work for OpenCorporates, the team behind this, and we were planning to do a "Show HN" in the next couple of days, once we'd got a few wrinkles sorted out.
In the meantime, I'll be around for a bit and try to answer any questions.