Last May we wrote about a new company called Crash Corp that was being formed by Digg’s long-time Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan, who were looking to build alternate reality mobile games. Over the last six months a lot has changed: the team has changed the company name to SimpleGeo, and they’re now building something that’s entirely different, and significantly more ambitious: an infrastructure that other applications can use to easily build location-based applications.
The new company caught our interest when we learned that AOL’s former chief life streamer David Liu had invested in the company. Stump and Galligan declined to comment on the company just yet (they’ll be launching at Under The Radar next month) but we were able to glean some information from Under The Radar’s directory of presenters.
SimpleGeo is ready-to-use location infrastructure. They currently have three products: a geo-spatial Context Engine, Storage Engine and a comprehensive SDK. The SimpleGeo Context Engine enables application developers to quickly and easily get relevant information about specific locales including (but not limited to) ZIP codes, real-time weather, and geo-tagged media. Additionally, the SimpleGeo Storage Engine makes it possible to store and query location data in a scalable fashion, as well as perform complicated geospatial operations effortlessly.
Located in Boulder, CO
It sounds like SimpleGeo is looking to become something analogous to an “AWS for location”. And that may well be a very smart move — Location based services are clearly about to explode as more mobile devices support GPS and fast internet connections. And you can be sure that the new startups and services that emerge won’t want to have to reinvent the wheel whenever they want to integrate location into their app. We’ll be keeping an eye for more on this one soon.
XMPP XEP-0080. Google and Apple seemed to ignore it. It seems like Google and Apple are idiotic when it comes to multi-tasking and real-time two-way comm. Google build a big SDK for maps for Android! But oooops, they forgot to include XEP-0080, and they had to implement their own proprietary flavor of XMPP. Thanks Google, way to support open-source.
Amazing stuff!
It’s very useful for people who really love locale based services. Hope SimpleGeo context engine serves much better than the others.
Congrats for Joe and Matt for their new project and I know this is going to be a success, too!
Yeah, these guys are on to something big. Boulder sure is turning out some great companies!
Are there any developers from the midwest who are into building smart phone apps out there??? The future is here and I would like to connect with people who think about mobile apps.
This sounds like it could be a a huge win assuming they can get significant adoption.
Looking forward to seeing this.
Google will probably eventually buy them, Matt is a big thinker.
Does anybody have any ideas of how to get more info. All I get from their site is a one pager.
Isn’t is what Imere http://www.imere.com is doing?
This sounds like what Yahoo! FireEagle should be but hasn’t lived up to be. Sounds very promising, I’ve been interested in the LBS space for quite some time having created location-based social network myself for my Master’s dissertation (http://lasyou.com).
Still waiting for LBS to take off!
As a group, we need to expand our thinking beyond the 1.0 geo-thinking of querying for information based on where you are. We need to move to 2.0 (or, at least 1.5) thinking – that is, leveraging location to provide services and information, as well as promotions based on your proximity, patterns, behaviors, preferences.
What SimpleGeo is going to do certainly is exciting. We firmly believe that location-powered services – those what we can think of today like marketing, advertising, business services – as well other innovative applications that have yet to be envisioned, will be powerful and, eventually, omnipresent in our lives.
At Xtify, we have been in this space for a while – offering companies software and tools to extract location persistently (continuously) from the mobile handset and then to take action based on that location with our location processing engines.
It won’t be long before the capabilities in Minority Report (Tom Cruise, great flick, you should see it) becomes commonplace for consumers and marketers alike.
jschiffman@xtify.com
Cool stuff!
TownMe has recently launched a related API that allows developers to access:
-16 million businesses and POI
-Reverse geocode to census tract, neighborhood, city, state
-Write to the API. E.g. store and retrieve location relevant info for your app.
You can check it out at http://sexyapi.com or http://api.townme.com