
SimpleGeo To Be Acquired By Urban Airship - turoczy
http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/31/simplegeo-to-be-acquired-by-urban-airship/
======
_corbett
I've used SimpleGeo since I met Joe Stump at Foo Camp. I was talking about my
early stage iPhone app, Kliq which needed reverse geo coding and a few other
basic location features. He suggested SimpleGeo and I got started
quickly–though each of the features I used I was ready to rebuild on my own
when the time came, rather than pay the as-then rather large monthly fee were
I to be so lucky to have so many users.

It's been bumpy, even with relying on them scantly–I had hoped the feature set
would grow and mature to take even more work off of my hands. Instead–several
times the API changed from under me without warning or backwards compatibility
and my alpha app simply broke. Once, embarrassingly in an investor
presentation, another time it took a personal tweet to the founders to get
things re-sorted out.

I'm sad that for so much money, such a great team, excellent visual design,
hot shot investors etc. they didn't take off. I wonder if they just didn't hit
on the right business model–for me it seemed I am something of a YCombinator
gamble for them: they want my startup Kliq to be reliant on their services
such that I can't or don't want to rebuild at scale (wasn't the case), price
such that they take money from me Kliq now, as small developer team with
little time to build cookie features not core to my app (they didn't charge us
a monthly fee until the very very end, while we probably would have paid
$5-$20 a month right away and up to $50 with more features), and price such
that they "exit" with Kliq if we do end up scaling. Then they just need some
success stories and they would have been too. Some ideas as a now former
"customer".

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geofflewis
The amount of hype these guys had measured against the ultimate outcome just
underscores that it is really, really hard to build a real business... and
much easier to get press. Kudos to them for trying. This is a downer.

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wijnglas
Blogpost (now pulled from Urban Airship blog):

Today I’m excited to the acquisition of SimpleGeo. You can read Jay Adelson’s
post here. [Dead link]

Both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo started two and a half years ago and I’ll
never forget when Crash Corp Inc. (the original SimpleGeo) launched as we both
went live with our new sites on the same day with the same font; Museo. We’ve
known each other over that entire time and shared lots of discussions and even
did a partnership deal in the last couple of months. As we continued to talk
and engage we realized that putting our two companies together would make for
a really interesting offering for our combined customers.

We’ve learned that our customers (brands, retailers, etailers, media, social
networking sites, games and others) want more than just generic tools. Instead
of building blocks they want a complete solution that can be used by the
entire company to help engage, monetize, locate and understand their mobile
user base. Urban Airship will fold in the SimpleGeo product suite to offer a
complete set of solutions for our ever growing customer base. Urban Airship is
now the leading platform for mobile cloud services in the market. This is a
fantastic win for both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo customers and investors.

Obviously there are many things that we need to work out while we make this
transition and we’ll be working closely with existing customers from both
companies to make sure they are up to speed on our future plans for the
combined roadmap.

We’re excited to be continuing to build the business, excited that the SG team
is joining Urban Airship, excited about having an office in San Francisco and
most of all excited about the next phase of PaaS that we’re going to dominate
in years to come.

You can still read it through Google Reader:
<http://cl.ly/3j0T36272H2r3J0r1N0Q>

Original URL: [http://urbanairship.com/blog/2011/10/31/urban-airship-
acquir...](http://urbanairship.com/blog/2011/10/31/urban-airship-acquires-
simplegeo/)

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jpdoctor
_Since SimpleGeo has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, it’s likely
that all or nearly all of the acquisition price would go to the last round
investors due to their liquidity preference._

Very unlikely, the team probably got a chunk.

Remember that the acquiring company is shelling out several million and they
really don't give a rat's behind about the liquidity preference. They want the
new team to be motivated.

It is standard for the VCs to waive the preference during the negotiations
(after much wheedling and whining). If they don't, the deal doesn't go down.

~~~
nl
_Very unlikely, the team probably got a chunk._

The Series A was $8.14M and they were acquired for $3.5M. If the team tried to
get a chunk of that then I doubt they'll be getting funding again.

 _Remember that the acquiring company is shelling out several million and they
really don't give a rat's behind about the liquidity preference._

It's not as simple as that. Both SimpleGeo and UrbanAirship are Foundry Group
companies[1][2].

This was clearly a firesale, and Joe Stump appears to care for his team
somewhat: _Cofounder Joe Stump used to be Digg’s chief architect. According to
TechCrunch, three of the new hires were laid off by Digg in March and the
fourth one decided to leave. Now, SimpleGeo is bringing in the new guns but
also familiar people, which seems to really solidify the team that stands now
at 17 employees._ [1]

It might be as simple as making sure everyone got a new job, and maybe the
non-Foundry Group investors got some money back.

[1] <http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/18/simplegeo-second-funding/>

[2]
[http://www.prweb.com/releases/UrbanAirshipFunding/SeriesB201...](http://www.prweb.com/releases/UrbanAirshipFunding/SeriesB2010/prweb4739174.htm)

~~~
jpdoctor
> If the team tried to get a chunk of that then I doubt they'll be getting
> funding again.

Again, it is in the interest of the acquiring company to have the liquidity
prefs waived. They want the money to go to the team and have no interest in
enriching the VCs.

One exception: Sometimes there is a conflict of interest, where the acquirer
has someone in a key position who is also a limited in the VC fund. This is
often the reason for some really dumb prices being paid in various deals.

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killion
While there are problems with SimpleGeo (neighborhood misspellings in San
Fran, GeoIP that isn't very complete, polygons that represent political
boundaries and not geo boundaries, etc) it is a useful and affordable service
that we use all the time. I kind of hoped it would go to Google who would use
it to improve their APIs.

I hope it lives on with Urban Airship and keeps getting resources to improve.
In the end it's a good thing that someone is competing with Google in this
space.

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davidu
This is probably true. And, this is a better outcome than most companies ever
see.

There are a great group of people at SimpleGeo, and while I never understood
how it would be a big business, I was always confident that if a big
opportunity existed, they would find it. What this says to me is that the big
opportunity in being the data layer for location does not exist as a stand-
alone entity.

~~~
brehardin
Their Series A was 8.14M, which is a HUGE, series A. If they are getting
acquired for $3.5M, assuming they have a little in the bank, this is not a
good exit.

I am sure the founders are seeing very little of this money. The liquidation
preferences "prefer" the investors.

~~~
davidu
I was being diplomatic.

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varikin
The description makes it sound like SimpleGeo is in trouble, e.g. once
promising, soft landing. Is there something more to this?

~~~
rabc
I'm a geolocation fan and developer from a long time, so always watched and
tested Simplegeo. But it seems they never got too much traction because their
platform is very specific, even for geolocation systems (someone correct me if
I'm wrong, please).

Yes, they have a pretty big apps showcase, but it's not enough sometimes.

Anyway, if they get acquired by Urban Airship, it will be great. UA will have
a better use for their platform (and UA will need geolocation soon), and I'm
happy Simplegeo will have a good use (what they built is really awesome, if
you understand geolocation).

~~~
oldstrangers
Kind of off topic, but can you recommend some services similar to simplegeo?

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lpolovets
Disclosure: I work at Factual.

Factual provides an API for businesses in the US and around the world. In
fact, SimpleGeo partnered with us for some of their data. Other alternatives
you can consider are FourSquare, Google Places, etc. Each alternative has it's
own pricing structure and terms and conditions.

You can browse some of our POI data by going to
<http://www.factual.com/topic/places>

~~~
rabc
Foursquare is good for a simple and fast list of places, but the data inside
that is incomplete sometimes.

This Factual is new to me and seems good, I will see it better later (big list
of places for Brazil, exactly what I need sometimes).

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DonnyV
I think they spent too much time rebuilding the wheel(there own gis engine)
and not enough on what services could make money. They could have easily used
MongoDB or PostGIS as there engine and built there services on that.

~~~
7952
Compared to PostGIS SimpleGeo is seriously lacking. You can only do the
simplest of queries, and it has tiny limits on most accounts.

The problem is that spatial data tends to create strange usage patterns
compared to other software. I run PostGIS installs with tens of millions of
features, most of which will never even be queried. Different spatial queries
can result in dramatically different resource needs. I need a service that is
affordable to store multi GB datasets, and can query them very quickly.
SimpleGeo have not come close to solving this.

~~~
sabman
Do checkout <http://spacialdb.com> <http://devcenter.spacialdb.com> Its got
PostGIS + REST API (GeoJson) Ping me for a private beta account if interested

~~~
rabc
I'm starting writing an essay for my Software Engineer graduate course and it
will be about architecture and design patterns for geolocation systems.

I checked SpacialDB page and it seems to be really good and useful for my
essay, I want to use it to describe one of the three cases. Can you send me a
beta invite, please? I registered there with this email: ricardo [at] fences
[dot] com [dot] br

I'm working on a business startup project and this essay will be part of it,
so I would like be a new customer when project start.

[edit] (ps.: I'm from Brazil. Feel free to contact me with that email.)

~~~
sabman
@rabc sent - go crazy!

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suking
Jay Adelson is very good at not exiting well.

~~~
CoachRufus87
He helped take his company, Equinix, public.

~~~
ojbyrne
Actually I believe they hired a CEO to do that.

