A couple weeks ago, SimpleGeo launched a couple of their APIs, Context and Places, into public beta and they were told that was probably a good cut off point for new products before the holidays. But they didn’t listen. Today they’re launching a bunch of things right before holiday break starts for many people.
So what did they want to get out the door before the new year? The biggest thing is what’s known as JSONP / JavaScript SDK, which is a new feature of their APIs that allows anyone to enable location on any website they control. This is done with two things: GeoIP and the W3C’s Geolocation API. The former is a technology used while they wait for more browsers to adopt the latter. Essentially, it looks up your IP address on the fly and geocodes it.
Also new is a way to easily turn human-readable addresses into the appropriate location data with SimpleGeo products. This means you can use an actual address instead of a latitude and longitude numbers. Currently, this will be U.S.-only, but the plan is to expand it.
SimpleGeo also finally has product pages for their main products. I’ve already linked to Context and Places above, but there’s also a Storage page (which is in private beta). Each of these pages have live demos of how the products actually work.
Finally, SimpleGeo has given all of their features QR codes. They say that instead of using the .json file, use a .png extension, and you’ll see the QR code while can easily be scanned by the appropriate apps in smartphones. (In this post, find the code for the TechCrunch office in San Francisco.)
SimpleGeo has said that all of their supported clients (iOS, Android, Java, and Python) will now have all of these features.
Read a bit more about the new additions on SimpleGeo’s blog.