For anyone that has followed Silicon Valley for the past ten years, Jay Adelson is a name that you know quite well. He’s best known for his work with Digg, during its heyday. After moving into the CEO position at SimpleGeo, which has since been acquired by Urban Airship, we’re told that Adelson is ready to make another run at a startup.
A tipster says that Adelson posted in a private Facebook… → Read More
At the end of October, Urban Airship, the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, acquired SimpleGeo for a reported $3.5 million. At the time, it was unclear what Urban Airship would be doing with the terabyte-plus of SimpleGeo location data, but in January, Urban Airship announced that it would be shutting down the… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post written by Robert Scoble, who travels the world for Rackspace interviewing tech geeks for building43.com. He’s one of the most popular (stalked) users of location-based services and has 8,215 friends on Foursquare. Here he writes about what the location-based world could look like in 2012 and what might keep it from happening.
It’s January 2012… → Read More
Facebook is under a lot of heat right now for how it shares our personal information. So much so that it is trying to simplify its privacy controls to so that nobody gets surprised when that embarrassing drunk photo you thought you were sharing only with a close set of friends finds its way all over the Web. (Hint: don’t put up drunk photos of yourself on Facebook). But this problem is only… → Read More
Almost exactly one year ago, we first wrote about former Digg lead architect, Joe Stump, and former Social Thing founder, Matt Galligan, teaming up to form Crash Corp., an “alternate reality mobile gaming” startup. A lot can change in a year.
Today, Stump and Galligan are well into building out SimpleGeo, the location platform company that Crash Corp. turned into. That transformation started only… → Read More
Yahoo has seen better days. I can’t remember when, but they’ve seen them. And today seems like a particularly bad one.
We just reported about Jonathan Trevor, one of the key figures behind Yahoo Pipes and YQL, is leaving the company for Polyvore. And now we have another one to report. Gary Gale, the Director of Engineering for Yahoo’s Geo team is out as well. → Read More
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… → Read More
With last week’s declaration by Twitter that it intends to start identifying places based on the coordinates of geo-coded Tweets, the location land rush is in full swing. A long list of companies including Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, and Citysearch are far along in creating separate databases of places mapped to their geo-coordinates. Mapping businesses, in… → Read More
If you’ll pardon the pun, SimpleGeo has positioned itself well.
With a frenzy of activity surrounding location-based services, more and more startups are launching ideas that rely heavily on location. But implementing location is still a relatively complicated process. And that’s where SimpleGeo comes in.
We’ve written about the service a number of times over the past several months. Basically… → Read More
Right before the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas a couple weeks ago, some of you may have read about SimpleGeo’s awesome location data visualization tool called Vicarious.ly. The site showed location information coming in to SimpleGeo from Austin in realtime, and included elements such as Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged tweets from Twitter. It… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
