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Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

urbanairship.com

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#12

> In order to deliver on this aggressive vision in the shortest amount of time possible, we need to focus our product development efforts. Let me get this straight. You want to focus on developing your product, but you want your customers to focus on migrating to another provider so that you can focus on your product. This is a pretty shitty way to treat a paying customer. A two and a half month notice is basically a…

> I'd be surprised if you kept any of those customers.

So would I, considering they're shutting down the product...

Roughly three months warning, plus free service during that time, plus free Urban Airship Pro for six months seems pretty reasonable to me. What length of time would you have considered fair?

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#13
Are you stuck between a rock and a hard place due to this announcement? Get ahold of my employer, Skookum Digital Works, if development is a bit tight before the transition and you need some helping hands.

http://skookum.com

Sorry for the shameless plug, but it's mutually beneficial if time is tight.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#14

> In order to deliver on this aggressive vision in the shortest amount of time possible, we need to focus our product development efforts. Let me get this straight. You want to focus on developing your product, but you want your customers to focus on migrating to another provider so that you can focus on your product. This is a pretty shitty way to treat a paying customer. A two and a half month notice is basically a…

> I'd be surprised if you kept any of those customers. So would I, considering they're shutting down the product... Roughly three months warning, plus free service during that time, plus free Urban Airship Pro for six months seems pretty reasonable to me. What length of time would you have considered fair?

The free service etc are lovely perks, but a year of notice would be nice.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#15
post #9

I really love SimpleGeos logos, but I have never grokked what problem they really solve for the user, but I totally get what urban airship solves. I've done a couple of app project with geo data but I don't see any benefit of having that part as a separate service. This is such fantastic logo and identity design work: http://softfacade.com/simplegeo.html

Thanks for posting this link! I've always wondered who designed the beautiful icons on their pages, and it's even more remarkable to see them in high-res.

They charge like $30k+ for website design - they better be good. SimpleGeo made someone money - a web design firm!

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#16

Anyone know of any sites using SimpleGeo for their location infrastructure?

We were using it in a yet to be released iPhone app as part of a venue locator. Specifically, we had various Storage layers with venues and other points of interest. Our client would have been able to add and remove POIs easily without updating the iOS app, layers could be turned off and on, etc. Now we must use local static data, we're just a couple of weeks away from release and can't really afford to switch our location backend.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zillow distributes free kml files for the neighborhood boundaries. Edit: here is the link http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm

Yeah, I've looked at those a while ago and it seemed that few cities, particularly NYC, the data was some what low quality. It was either really lacking in certain areas or the neighborhood boundaries were far off from what people who actually live in the city consider to be the boundaries. Although perhaps they've gotten better, I'll give them a look.

That link is old, but another resource to look into is http://www.openstreetmap.org/

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#20
We were actually just starting to use SimpleGeo for storage and lookup. We need to geocode the points and their added benefit of weather/location info was a plus. Does anybody know of a good alternative?

Edit: Here is a great list of alternatives https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31...

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