Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo • Hacker News Board

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#61

Post by nhangen » Sat, Jan 14, 2012, 3:57 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #38

petrichor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are going to use the tech, just as a feature of their push product, rather than as its own offering.

Yeah, the straightforward reading is that they are folding the tech into their flagship product instead of running multiple products.

That's what they're trying to do, but by forcing the users to adapt rather than adapting on the product side. Certainly doesn't feel like a user-centric approach.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#62

Post by mmalone » Sat, Jan 14, 2012, 6:45 PM UTC

geogeek wrote: post #59

I 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, t…

Not sure where you're getting your information, but it's almost entirely wrong. GISelle is the same tech as Penelope. It was renamed because there was a trademark issue. Polygon search has been implemented for some time, but was delayed for product reasons (it's actually live, just undocumented). Tag indexing was launched with SimpleGeo storage from day one. Indexing of all properties by default happened several months before the acquisition. Both features were developed by people who are still at the company.

The company was acquired because it has real, defensible technology. If you're going to talk shit, at least get your facts straight.

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#63

Post by dravnic » Sat, Jan 14, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

SG alternative for geo storage, query and visualization:

http://www.giscloud.com/

http://dev.giscloud.com/RestGuide

http://dev.giscloud.com/RestApiReference

Re: Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo

#64

Post by runako » Wed, Jan 18, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

lgas wrote: post #58

runako wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the help, but that's not exactly what I was looking for. For instance, I'd have needed ready access to the amount of their total capital raise and the exit price. Exit prices are usually not published, and I don't believe this one was published. So that's still kind of an "Inside Baseball" answer. I was looking for more objective answers, but perhaps the only way anyone here knew SimpleGeo was doomed was by staying current on the scuttlebutt. Unfortunately, that doesn't really scale.