AllTrails, the AngelPad and 500 Startups-backed company working to build the most comprehensive database of hiking, biking and camping trails around the world, is announcing a major partnership today with National Geographic. As a part of the deal, the AllTrails website is relaunching this morning with a brand-new redesign built from the ground up, and is co-branded with National Geographic’s logo.

According to CEO Russell Cook, National Geographic’s five-year old online property Topo.com, a website that worked with the company’s boxed software, was seeing around 300,000 registered users prior to today’s partnership. But National Geographic was never able to properly develop that resource, so it’s now shutting the site down. Going forward, all of Topo’s traffic will be redirected to AllTrails, and NatGeo will also provide AllTrails with access to its own mapping data.

With AllTrails‘ 200,000 users, the combination of the two sites will boost the company’s userbase considerably – up to half a million users. As a part of the partnership, National Geographic has also provided AllTrails with some development dollars, but nothing that can be disclosed.

For those unfamiliar, AllTrails was founded about two years ago, with the focus on solving the problem of the incomplete and inaccurate data about spots for outdoors activities. This information is often found in analog format (e.g., guidebooks), but had not been properly digitized or organized on the web. To address the problem, AllTrails pulls in publicly available data and combines it with crowd-sourced efforts in order to build its database of outdoor trails and other activity spots.

“The information is out there, it’s all over the place, and you can’t really trust it,” says Cook, of the publicly available data from government organizations in the U.S. like the Forest Service and the National Parks Service. “We go back through it with a team of editors, and a lot of our top users help as well. Any user can submit edits to new trails, then we have a team of editors that make sure it’s accurate before we publish it to the online database,” he explains. Sometimes this process even requires calling up the park in question to determine the data’s accuracy.

After building its database for North America, AllTrails participated in the San Francisco-based incubator AngelPad’s first round of startups last year, in order to build its mobile applications. The company now has both iPhone and Android apps, and will offer a mobile website to those on other platforms. Unlike many other outdoor activity maps, AllTrails’ mobile apps intelligently cache content on your device, taking up minimal space, so you can access the maps even when you don’t have a signal. No extra effort is required on the user’s part, either – the app caches content based on your usage of the app, not on explicit commands to download data.

The company is now investing its resources in Android development, with the focus on bring the Android app to feature parity with the iPhone app in a few months time. It’s also planning on international expansion efforts, beginning with the U.K., Australia, and South Africa later this summer.

With the new deal between AllTrails and NatGeo in place, AllTrails will be able to launch a paid version of its product for the first time. This will include premium mapping content from National Geographic, GPS routes for trails (available online and on mobile) and discounts with retail partners. These features will roll out next month.

The new website, however, is going live this morning at AllTrails.com. The expected launch time should be between 5 and 6 AM PST, but is not exact. (If AllTrails doesn’t look like the screenshots below, then you’re seeing the old version. Keep refreshing!)

The contest runs until January 26, and the final winner will be announced in February. Nikon has arranged for National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths on a photo excursion during the spring of 2011, and Nikon will provide the winner with a brand new D7000 DSLR and private tutoring from a Nikon product specialist. This sounds like a golden opportunity for someone, and I know I’ll be entering and trying to win.

There seems to be a common cycle for many startups. First, you capture users. Then, you capture brands/celebrities. Then you capture revenues. Most startups never make it past step one, let alone steps two and three. The mobile photo sharing service Instagram rocketed past step one in about a week. And then kept going. Now it’s time to explore step two. Which is exactly what they’re doing with their first major brand partnership: National Geographic.

The partnership seems like an obvious one since Instagram is all about great-looking pictures, and National Geographic is known for great-looking pictures. “National Geographic makes a ton of sense as an initial partner – they’re a fantastic company with such a rich visual history. Given that they’re so visually oriented, it’s a no-brainer that we’re going to be trying some interesting stuff out with them over the next few months,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells us.

He notes that they’ve been talking to National Geographic for weeks about a potential partnership and what it could mean and how it could work. “Basically, we’ve been going back and forth — brainstorming ideas for how NG can participate in the community,” Systrom says. He says that it remains to be seen exactly how National Geographic will use the service, but says that engaging their fans will be a first priority.

“They’d like to participate more actively with their fans through photos – whether it’s enabling people from around the world to tell their story through an interesting prompt/contest, or crowd sourcing images for an upcoming story — everything’s on the table,” he says.

“They’ve also got a huge photographer/reporter base that could contribute images ‘on the ground’ as things happen — imagine a ‘live’ version of National Geographic. But again, this is all very early, and we’re excited to figure out how NG and other brands can fully utilize our platform,” Systrom continues.

Systrom also notes that while they have been talking to other potential partners, they have nothing else to announce just yet. “Talking with brands has always been on our todo list – but doing so only really makes sense when you reach a certain scale to provide a big enough audience. Instagram is quickly becoming a standard tool in people’s social media toolkit, and it’s natural to start talking to brands about how they can leverage the visual nature of Instagram,” he says.

He also declined to give any specific numbers in terms of their current userbase nuumbers, but it seems pretty likely that they’re already close to a million users (if not past the milestone).

Things are pretty busy at the old Twitter office.

What you get is a digital version of every issue, including the articles, pictures, maps, advertisements, everything that’s made NatGeo great over the years. It comes on a 160GB external hard drive, of which only 60GB is actually pre-loaded. Of course, you could probably pick up a 160GB drive for only $80, but it wouldn’t have all the NatGeo content. The package also comes with a DVD offering tips on better photography, a behind the scenes look at how National Geographic is produced and interviews with some of the photographers about their most famous pictures. It’ll set you back $199.95, but I think it’s totally worth it. Honestly, I’ll probably be ordering a copy for my personal library.

[via Download Squad]

Check out this huge infograph that displays the last 50 years of space exploration. It’s awesome although it does kind of indicate that Venus is closer to earth than the Moon. The “50 Years of Space Exploration” graphic was created by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic. I must say though, skip the interactive edition on NationalGeographic.com and check out the full size version on Flickr.

[via OhGizmo]

It’s nice to see that sometimes this wireless stuff lives up to the hype.

National Geographic’s TOPO! Explorer gives daring technophiles a chance to create and share their favorite trails using detailed topographic maps provided by USGS. These maps support GPS integration, which makes things easy. Just upload a map to a supported device, head off in the general direction of the trail, and you’re on your way. You can also attach geo-tagged photos to your maps, allowing you to show points of interest (or beauty). And when you’re done you can share you experiences through comments or on the site’s forums.

The site has just opened in feature-limited public beta, and hopes to fully launch on May 30th. Unfortunately, GPS integration, which may well be the site’s greatest asset, is not free. Currently National Geographic is charging $25 for the desktop software that enables this feature – a price that, while reasonable, may be the site’s undoing. Hopefully National Geographic will abandon this setup, at least while the site is establishing a user base. Maps are currently pretty sparse, and many people might be turned off by the prospect of paying when there is so little content to be had.

With enough users and some support more from the esteemed National Geographic brand, this site has a decent chance at taking off, or at least getting the hardcore outdoorsy niche audience on board.

Update: National Geographic has informed us that the desktop application is free, and that the $25 applies to map credits. This page is the source of confusion, and is going to be updated shortly.

Add National Geographic to the growing list of studio going exclusively Blu-ray. Starting with its next release, “Sharkwater,” (that’s the trailer up there) the comapny will ditch its practice of supporting both HD DVD and Blu-ray. It’s only released one such movie so far, “Relentless Enemies,” so it’s not a seismic shift in the landscape or anything.

Warner distributes National Geographic releases, so it’s not really surprising that it went Blu-ray. BBC releases are the only ones under the Warner auspices that are still format neutral. We’ll see how long that lasts.

National Geographic Makes Move to Blu-ray Exclusivity (UPDATED) [High-Def Digest]