1. Development Seed created a heat map of crime in DC[1] and wanted dark tiles. So 3 of the founders, Alex Barth, Jeff Miccolis, and Tom MacWright created the Nice Map module[2] as a tile (WMS) management client for Drupal.
2. Development Seed uses Mapnik to manage their WMS server [3]
3. Development Seed started to share tile sets for maps hosted on AWS on Mapbox.com.[4]
4. The MapBox product is created and effort is put into it.[5]
5. They created Maps on a Stick and iOS client apps [6]
6. TileMill is released so people can create their own map tiles[7]
7. Development jumps from Drupal and the LAMP stack to Node.js and MabBox.[8]
