I had the chance to sit down with Joe Stump, former Lead Architect at Digg who recently co-founded a startup called SimpleGeo, at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam.
We’ve covered the company he started with Matt Galligan (of Socialthing fame) a number of times in the past, but I was interested to learn how things were working out for the fledgling startup, which is looking to capitalize on the location craze (some call it a war, Stump calls it a gold rush) by delivering relevant infrastructure services. Think Amazon S3 for geodata.
Stump tells me that the company, which has raised a little over $1.5 million in funding from an impressive list of high-profile investors, now counts 13 employees, almost all of which are engineers. SimpleGeo is based in Boulder, Colorado, but will be opening an office in San Francisco in June. The company has attracted about 2,700 application developers to sign up for the beta, and added between 1,000 and 1,500 more in recent times.
Stump also detailed SimpleGeo’s pricing model, which they’re currently tweaking after having found that the plans weren’t quite flexible enough for its customers, but I’ll let you watch the video for details on that.
Of course, we also touched upon Facebook’s and Twitter’s plans regarding the location game. With Twitter recently having acquired SimpleGeo competitor Mixer Labs / GeoAPI, I was wondering if Facebook had approached the startup for a similar deal by now …
Joe Stump was the Lead Architect of Digg. While there he was responsible for making sure the applications built at Digg will scale into infinity and beyond. For the last 10 years he’s specialized in building highly scalable LAMP solutions. When not working on Digg he spends time maintaining a number of PEAR projects and explores San Francisco. Joe left Digg in May 2009 to found SimpleGeo.
SimpleGeo provides a ready-to-use location infrastructure that makes it easy to ad location-aware features to applications. The company was founded in 2009 by Matt Galligan and Joe Stump and was acquired by Urban Airship in October 2011.
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