

Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo - mikeocool
http://urbanairship.com/blog/2012/01/12/update-on-our-plan-to-integrate-location-and-context-services-into-our-push-messaging-platform/

======
MatthewPhillips
> 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 fuck you, I'd be
surprised if you kept any of those customers.

~~~
ceejayoz
> 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?

~~~
runako
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...](https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/311996-simplegeo-
migration-options)) 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
replicate the functionality in-house.

This isn't about users being too lazy to switch to option B, this is about
SimpleGeo building an innovative service and then abandoning its paying users.

~~~
indiekid
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.

~~~
shinratdr
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.

------
sunkencity
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>

~~~
d_r
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.

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

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

~~~
ashbrahma
Could you post your contact info on your HN profile, so I can get in touch
with you?

~~~
harrylove
<http://www.callmejeffrey.com/>

------
nhangen
So they didn't buy SG to get the founders, and aren't going to use the tech,
so all that's left is customers, which they're not going to keep using a
transition strategy like this.

I don't get it...

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

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

~~~
nhangen
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.

------
seanmccann
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...](https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/311996-simplegeo-
migration-options)

------
hopeless
It's depressing how little trust you can put in web services these days. I'd
considered using SimpleGeo for a project and, like most people who did, it
would have been a major component. Phew!

Antics like this make me distrust all web services in the future. They've got
to have a really strong income stream and most definitely not a target of a
talent acquisition, if I'm to rely on them.

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

~~~
HectorRamos
The co-founders left to work on new ventures. There's Joe Stump's Sprint.ly,
and Matt Galligan's Circa.

~~~
X-Istence
For anyone that is trying to find something on Circa ... seems it is still in
stealth. Might save you some time Googling.

------
geogeek
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, 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.

~~~
mmalone
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.

------
mikeocool
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.

~~~
brianbreslin
zillow distributes free kml files for the neighborhood boundaries.

Edit: here is the link <http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-
boundaries.htm>

~~~
mikeocool
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.

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

------
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.

------
melvinmt
"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

<http://www.quora.com/Why-did-SimpleGeo-fail>

------
dravnic
SG alternative for geo storage, query and visualization:

<http://www.giscloud.com/>

<http://dev.giscloud.com/RestGuide>

<http://dev.giscloud.com/RestApiReference>

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

~~~
andrewem
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.

~~~
sabman
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...](http://devcenter.spacialdb.com/Layers-
API-v1-Documentation.html)) 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)

------
mkramlich
_(cough)_ acquhire

------
twidlit
Any good alternative to SimpleGeo? Is Factual even the same?

~~~
logn
quote from article: "Factual has been providing SimpleGeo with their Places
data since June 2011"

------
jqueryin
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.

