Any good alternative to SimpleGeo? Is Factual even the same?
Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#52We all know SimpleGeo was a failure. It doesn't count as an acquisition. It failed, and the founders moved on to Urban Airship.
To be fair, that's not true at all. It was an acquisition in every sense of the word at the time. SimpleGeo, customers, tech and team were acquired (apart from us founders).
Was SimpleGeo not profitable? Is there a particular part of the service that is more popular?
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#53"Why did SimpleGeo fail?
1. You could mean "to dwindle, pass, or die away". To this definition, I would say that no, in fact, SimpleGeo did not die, as it's going to be thriving at Urban Airship, working towards a larger goal of building a powerful mobile infrastructure company." - Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo Co-Founder
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#54We all know SimpleGeo was a failure. It doesn't count as an acquisition. It failed, and the founders moved on to Urban Airship.
The co-founders left to work on new ventures. There's Joe Stump's Sprint.ly, and Matt Galligan's Circa.
For anyone that is trying to find something on Circa ... seems it is still in stealth. Might save you some time Googling.
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#55Any good alternative to SimpleGeo? Is Factual even the same?
quote from article: "Factual has been providing SimpleGeo with their Places data since June 2011"
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Urban Airship "bought" SimpleGeo, a failed service. Where "bought" means forcibly swallowed it based on VC pressure. Anyone with half a clue could have seen this coming a mile away. Why would you spend time and effort developing a failed product you didn't create when your highly successful product is your main focus? Move along, nothing to see here.
People probably developed for the API before SimpleGeo was in trouble. Those who already invested in the API hoped that UrbanAirship would continue the SimpleGeo brand, perhaps with better management. It would appear that UrbanAirship spent a couple million just to try & snag customers.
Essentially they've punched a hole in the SimpleGeo life raft & are offering parachutes & life raft building instructions to the now drowning customers. Some will be hostile to these actions.
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#57Anyone know of any sites using SimpleGeo for their location infrastructure?
I'd been considering using it through Heroku to be able to find nearby bus/train stops in a public transit mobile web app. I see that SpacialDB is in private beta as a Heroku addon ( http://addons.heroku.com/spacialdb ) - does anyone have SpacialDB experience? I'm looking to find nearby points out of a database of ~5000 locations, namely all the public transit stops in the Boston area.
Hi Andrew, would love to have you to try out SpacialDB, just send me an email at info~at~spacialdb~dot~com and I'd be very happy to send you a beta invite.
With SpacialDB, we wanted the best of both worlds, traditional GIS and Web, RT & Mobile-Centric APIs.
The way we did this was to let users provision databases, then import any geodata (points,lines,polygons 2 or 3D) into SpacialDB and either use a raw PostgreSQL connection (from a pool) or our REST API (http://devcenter.spacialdb.com/Layers-API-v1-Documentation.h...) to query it - its super useful for building geo-apps quickly.
In fact, initially that's why we built it; we need a quick way to get going for a lot of the disaster response work we do at nomad-labs (geospatial.nomad-labs.com)
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#58We 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 shoul…
Well, one sign is that the exit price was about a third of the money they raised.
Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
#59I think what really happened is that Urban Airship discovered the SimpleGeo service was really crappy and decided it needed to shut it down as soon as possible to avoir eternel peril...
SimpleGeo has rewritten its platform several times (project GISele, then project Penelope), it was done by people who thought they knew how to do geosearch, but they really had no idea, for example they never offered polygon search, they also only offered tag search a few weeks prior to being acquired, and it was done by a girl who left the company like a week after her feature went live.
This company was probably a scam from day one, it only got money because its founders were reknown.