Yesterday Urban Airship announced that it would be shutting down SimpleGeo on March 31 2012, only a few months after acquiring the company for around $3.5 million. The news irked plenty of developers — you can find a thread on Hacker News here where some SimpleGeo customers are voicing their frustration.
So what are developers supposed to do now? Urban Airship’s blog post outlines a few options, including a partnership with Factual to port over any Places data developers might have stored on SimpleGeo. But SimpleGeo also has a handful of other classes of data, like Storage, that Factual can’t be used for. Now Parse is stepping in to try to help out (and snag) any customers looking to figure out where to move next. → Read More
Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo at the end of October for approximately $3.5 million. Considering that the two startups had some months before struck a strategic partnership, and both provide location-based services for mobile developers, the acquisition made sense, even if the price was lower than many had hoped. (And SimpleGeo Co-founder Joe Stump left the company post-acquisition, following Co-founder Matt Galligan.)
At the time, it was unclear what Urban Airship would be doing with the terabyte-plus of SimpleGeo location data. Today, that became clear. Simply put, it looks like it’s curtains for SimpleGeo’s services. Urban Airship said this afternoon, after the requisite internal discussions, talks with customers, and hand-wringing, that it will “wind down the availability of the current versions of [SimpleGeo's] Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months”. → Read More
Nick Halstead, who founded ‘big data’ startup DataSift, has decided to step down as chief executive officer as the company gears up for its official launch later this week.
Halstead will become DataSift’s CTO, and the role of CEO will go to Rob Bailey, a former Yahoo bizdev exec who most recently served as VP of Business Development at SimpleGeo, which was just acquired by Urban Airship. → Read More
Following in the footsteps of co-founder Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo CTO and co-founder Joe Stump has announced he is leaving the company today; In a blog post titled “Looking Back While Moving Forward” the former Digg lead architect talks about the recent Urban Airship acquisition of SimpleGeo and his future plans, which include a recreational vehicle and a “lovely lady” but don’t include SimpleGeo in any capacity that isn’t advisory.
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Well, it’s been an interesting last few weeks for Urban Airship, the startup that aims to give developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps.
A week ago, Urban Airship acquired Matt Galligan and Joe Stump’s SimpleGeo (the news was broken by TechCrunch Founder Mike Arrington), and today the startup has announced that it raised $15 million in series C financing from new strategic investors Verizon and Salesforce.com. Existing investors True Ventures and Foundry Group also participated in the cash round, bringing Urban Airship’s total funding to $26.1 million. → Read More
Back in November of 2009, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan first publicly unveiled their new startup, SimpleGeo, which was slated to become the new infrastructure for location-based services. They called it the “Amazon Web Services” for location, offering products that make it easy for developers to build location-enabled web and mobile apps, including storage, context, API features, and polymaps.
This morning Mike Arrington reports that SimpleGeo has been acquired by Urban Airship for approximately $3.5 million. In July, the two companies formed a strategic partnership which was intended to, put simply, provide better ways for developers to offer location-aware push notifications in their applications. Geo-targeted notifications were expected to be a big source of revenue for both startups, but it seems that it just made more sense for the companies to move forward as one rather than as two separate entities.
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Last November, location startup SimpleGeo brought in former Digg CEO Jay Adelson to replace co-founder Matt Galligan as CEO. At the time, Galligan slid into the role of Chief Strategy Officer and became more of a public face for the company. Now he’s leaving the company entirely.
You can read the news on SimpleGeo’s blog here, as well as Galligan’s own thoughts here. But essentially this is something that has been in the works ever since Adelson took over those many months ago, Galligan tells us. With the company now transitioning into their next phase, Galligan felt the time was right to fully step aside. He’ll continue to serve as an advisor, but Adelson and SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump will continue to steer the ship. → Read More
Over the past couple of years, push notifications have become a vital part of the mobile picture. There are so many apps, and so much that you can do on smartphones, that you need a system to alert you when something comes up that you’ll want to know about. But these notifications are still not a particularly easy thing for developers to wrap their heads around and implement. That’s why Urban Airship exists. And all of the same things can be said about location. Which is why SimpleGeo exists. So it seems to be a good match that the two of them are hooking up for a partnership.
As they’ll announce as OSCON (the open source developer conference) today, Urban Airship and SimpleGeo have signed a long-term strategic partnership agreement. Given the wide-range of services that both companies offer, this could ultimately mean many things. But the core idea is to provide developers with a simple way to offer location-aware push notifications in their applications.
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In the quest for a unified database of places, geo-location startup Factual is making big strides. Today it is announcing a major partnership with SimpleGeo to maintain and power its places database, which up until now has offered a competing database of places in the eyes of developers.
The merged database will have 30 million places, and be maintained and updated by Factual. Developers will be able to access the database either through SimpleGeo or Factual. “It’s Factual’s dataset, our interface,” says SimpleGoo CEO Jay Adelson. → Read More
The story of SimpleGeo is a familiar one: two founders — Matt Galligan and Joe Stump — set off to create location-based games, only to find that the tools they wanted to use to build their apps didn’t exist yet. So they switched gears and decided to build what they wished they had: a suite of tools optimized for the creation of location-based services (which was probably a good call given the explosion of location-aware mobile devices).
The startup launched almost exactly one year ago, and now offers products including ‘Places’ (a database of POIs) and ‘Context’, which lets developers query for data relevant to a given location, like the local weather. And now, they’re ready for what Galligan calls the company’s “grand unveiling”, explaining that it’s what they’ve been focused on for the last year: SimpleGeo Storage, which will be going live tomorrow. → Read More
When Twitter bought Mixer Labs in December, 2009, it inherited the startup’s then-recently launched GeoAPI, which offered a platform for building geo apps. The GeoAPI combined a places database of 16 million businesses with a reverse-geo-coder and support for geo-coded Tweets, Flickr photos, and even an iPhone SDK. Twitter kept the GeoAPI going after the acquisition—but that ends at the end of March.
According to a developer who used to build his product on the GeoAPI, Twitter is shutting it down for outside developers. It is too much of a hassle to maintain, apparently. Twitter will still use it internally for its own apps. (Note that this GeoAPI is not the same as Twitter’s more limited Geotagging API, which is still fully functional). So far no announcement on this. It’s going in the deadpool. I’ve reached out to Twitter for a comment. → Read More
One of my big predictions for 2011 is that we are going to start to see open databases for places spring up and take hold. Hyperpublic, which just launched today, is doing just that by creating an open database of people, places, and things tied to specific locations. “We are trying to structure the data in your local world,” says CEO and founder Jordan Cooper, who is also a partner at Lerer Ventures. In the video after the jump, he gives me a quick demo of the service.
Hyperpublic has raised a $1.2 million seed round from Lerer Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, RRE Ventures, NextView Ventures, Hudson River Angels, Thrive Capital, and Softbank. → Read More
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. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first.
In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (FourSquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology. So where is social networking headed next? I make eight predictions below.
1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable
Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook. There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front. Ultimately I don’t believe users or society as a whole will accept a single company “locking in” our vital information.
Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again. I know in 2010 this doesn’t seem obvious to everybody but it’s my judgment. Either they make our social graph portable or we’ll find other networks to join. I predict this will come before the end of 2012. → Read More
The geolocation wars are well underway. If you need any proof of that, simply look at this thread in Quora. A startup posted a question wondering which place database they should use for their new check-in app. The responses? Foursquare: Us. Gowalla: Us. SimpleGeo: Us. Factual: Us. Locationary: Us.
Each of these companies, along with a few other big ones not practicing the art of self-promotion on Quora (Google, Facebook, Skyhook) are all in the midst of what is sure to be a drawn-out battle to become the underlying location layer that lets a thousand other startups bloom on top of it. → Read More
We cornered SimpleGeo founder Matt Galligan yesterday and talked to him about SimpleGeo’s newest hire, Mike’s infamous “What Is It You Do? The Need For Simplicity” post (which focused on the fact that it’s difficult to pinpoint what SimpleGeo actually does) and the difference between a location-based service vs. a location-aware service.
At the center of the geo-locational explosion, SimpleGeo provides infrastructure tools (like a Software Developer Kit) to developers who want to add location services to their apps. → Read More
Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg until April 2010, just landed in a new position. He’s taking over as CEO of location services startup SimpleGeo, and will join the company’s board of directors. Founding CEO Matt Galligan will become the company’s Chief Strategy Officer.
SimpleGeo, which has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, allows companies to add location features to applications. Earlier this year we made light fun of the company for failing to clearly explain exactly what developers get out of their product.
Hopefully Adelson understands the company. And he certainly seems to. In a phone call this morning he said he’s excited to be working with former Digg employees Joe Stump and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, and said he’s looking forward working at a startup that is at the absolute center of things right now. → Read More
Warren Buffett is famous for telling people they should only invest in businesses they understand. A corollary to that is that a company should be able to describe in simple terms what they do. Even if what they do is really technical and complicated.
Why? First so employees and investors can get on board and help the company get where it wants to go. But it’s just as important that your potential customers know what you can do for them. And just because you offer a product to businesses or developers instead of everyday consumers doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep things simple.
We see startups all the time that we don’t understand. I used to think I was just in over my head. But over the years I’ve met CEOs who can explain the most complicated technology in relatively simple terms via analogies or use cases. Those that can’t aren’t doing their job. → Read More
Running a marathon is hard. I should know, I’ve never even considered running one. But a lot of people do. And a lot of people like the idea of going to watch others run marathons. I have no idea why, but they do — I’ve seen it on TV. Anyway, if you have any interest in tracking a marathon, Skyhook Wireless has a pretty cool way of doing it.
The San Francisco Marathon is this coming Sunday. To coincide with it, Skyhook Wireless has set up a new “Skyhook Experience” to track the event. On their page, you’ll be able to see geotagged tweets, Flickr photos, and Foursquare check-ins all around the event in realtime. You’ll also be able to go back in time (with a slider) to watch all of the aforementioned data evolve. → Read More
As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, iOS 4 is out and spreading across iPhones like wildfire. With it, comes the ability for third-party apps to run certain tasks in the background. One of those tasks is background location — an awesome feature which we previewed in our review of Loopt 3.0 earlier today. But Loopt has been in the location game for a long time — what about startups that want to get into location right now and support the newest functionality? SimpleGeo has you covered.
The location infrastructure startup is today adding to its array of options, iOS 4 location support. With it, companies will be able to implement background location services for iOS 4 with a few simple code tweaks. How easy is it to implement with SimpleGeo? Geofencing, the ability to track when a user crosses a certain location-based plane, will take about six lines of code, co-founder Joe Stump tells us. Background Tracking will take about 30 lines of code. From what I hear, this is much, much simpler than trying to write this stuff yourself. And this is all done in SimpleGeo’s cloud. → Read More
