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Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

urbanairship.com

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Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#41

Post by mmalone »

runako wrote: post #27
earl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SimpleGeo building an innovative service and then abandoning its paying users well, that's what companies do when they fail, go out of business, or are acquihired, ie a business failure by another name

No, that's what Urban Airship decided to do with the service they bought. We're dealing with the only continuing entity in the equation here, Urban Airship, which is not going out of business. Urban Airship is making the decision to abandon their customers (they bought them) in a crappy manner. Without working at Urban Airship or SimpleGeo (or being close to someone who does), how would one know that when Urban Airsh…

@foobarbazetc: you seem to know an awful lot about the SimpleGeo acquisition. Which VCs were forcing Urban Airship to do the deal?

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#42

Post by rhizome »

indiekid wrote: post #28
runako wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 months of warning for the shutdown of a product with no drop-in alternatives is really an insult. Look closely at the migration page ( https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31... ) and you'll get a sense of the effort to replace SimpleGeo. For instance, the recommendation for users of the Context product is to read the Wikipedia page on R-trees, then download various census etc. data to replicat…

Can't say I agree with you about us "abandoning" our users. SimpleGeo was acquired by Urban Airship and the decision was made to discontinue the service. Disappointing, sure.

That's just passing the buck, and besides, "you" didn't abandon SimpleGeo users, UA did.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#43

Post by runako »

AznHisoka wrote: post #11

We all know SimpleGeo was a failure. It doesn't count as an acquisition. It failed, and the founders moved on to Urban Airship.

It seems this is the accepted wisdom among the posters here. For those of us not in the Valley/Portland, what were the signs that an acquisition was due to business failure?

One poster said most companies that get acquired are shut down within the year (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458414). This appears ridiculous on its face (or there needs to be a mass migration from Heroku), but what other symptoms should folks have been looking for here? I'm interested in objective measures that one might reasonably use in evaluating vendors. I'm specifically not interested in things like how many/few job postings they run on Stack Overflow, the chatter at the last San Jose Ruby Meetup, VC blog posts, etc.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#44

Post by shinratdr »

indiekid wrote: post #28
runako wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 months of warning for the shutdown of a product with no drop-in alternatives is really an insult. Look closely at the migration page ( https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31... ) and you'll get a sense of the effort to replace SimpleGeo. For instance, the recommendation for users of the Context product is to read the Wikipedia page on R-trees, then download various census etc. data to replicat…

Can't say I agree with you about us "abandoning" our users. SimpleGeo was acquired by Urban Airship and the decision was made to discontinue the service. Disappointing, sure.

I don't see how your comment explains anything or makes it seem better. You sold the company to a company that wasn't committed, and your users are suffering for it.

I like that phrasing, "The decision was made." Like it was an unstoppable edict from God himself. I can't speak for anyone else but I never support the future endeavours of a dev that treats me like that.

I'm your customer, and if you sell me to another organization you better make damn sure that organization has my interests at heart, or you'll never see me as a customer again. YOU dropped the ball. Passing the buck only makes you feel temporarily better, it doesn't actually make anything better.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#45

Post by [deleted] »

seanmccann wrote: post #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...

[deleted]

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#46

Post by neovive »

I definitely wasn't happy when I heard the news as I now have to rebuild some production code. However, I always had the feeling that relying on a smaller provider for critical data was a risk -- the SimpleGeo API was just too easy to pass up.

It appears that Factual might be picking up some of the slack. I'm also looking into Google Maps API again. Oh well -- no sense worrying about it; just need to learn and move on.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#47

Post by neovive »

brianbreslin wrote: post #4
mikeocool wrote: post #2

Really disappointed to hear this news. The SimpleGeo Context API gas been a really great resource for geographic data that isn't otherwise easily/affordably available, like neighborhood boundaries.

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

Is there a good implementation guide for using the kml data to lookup a neighborhood given a lat,lng? I considered the Zillow files prior to using SimpleGeo, but implementing a spatial database in MySQL seemed very complex in comparison to a simple CURL request. Perhaps, this is worth another look.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#49

Post by maratd »

evgen wrote: post #29
ojbyrne wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers other than the founders?

They could have just been hired directly. Why bother acquiring if you have no interest in 1) the IP, 2) the founders or management team, or 3) the customers?

It's not that simple to hire. They acquired a team specialized in geolocation that worked together for a while. Might be worth its weight in gold.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#50

Post by carlsednaoui »

jeffreyk wrote: post #30
suking wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SoftFacade didn't design the SimpleGeo website, I did :)

Ha, that's why I love HN!
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