

SimpleGeo Launches - kingkilr
http://simplegeo.com/

======
joestump
Hi, I'm the CTO and cofounder of SimpleGeo. Many of your points about sparse
documentation, website, etc. are fair. We're about 3 hours old so give us a
little time to fill everything in. Lots of work to do here, which is why we
hired Andrew Mager to be a developer advocate.

1\. You can think of us as S3 for location data. Before S3 scaling file
storage was a messy, complex, and costly proposition. After S3 it was as
simple as posting files to an endpoint. We do this for geometric/location
data. We store and index your data and allow you to easily do geospatial
queries against your location data.

2\. We give away 1m calls a month, which is the same that Twitter gives away
for free, and _more_ than Google Maps does. The pricing plans are based on
what it'd cost to manage your own infrastructure. We'll be adding lots more
features, options, data, etc. in the coming weeks/months.

3\. To the people saying they can just install GeoDjango and PostGIS, I have a
few questions. How much time are you spending building and maintaining your
own location API? How much does it cost to rent/buy that hardware? Is your
location infrastructure multi-homed in three data centers? Does your location
infrastructure come with premium content like global weather data and 16m+
business listings? Can it keep up with the real-time geohose from Twitter?
Does it do URL callbacks and S3 backups automatically? We handle all of that
for you.

4\. The location marketplace will allow developers to tap into billions of
points of interest and previously unattainable features for low monthly costs.
For instance, Metacarta and Quova solutions are very much enterprise solutions
that cost real money, but they'll be available on demand for small per-
drink/per-month costs. We've indexed over half a terabyte of location data
(when you're talking about point data that's a lot) that's instantly available
to developers.

5\. We have robust SDKs for the iPhone, including an augmented reality view.
The AR view allows you to show a sophisticated AR view of your data, in our
API, in about ~10 lines of code.

You all are absolutely right that we need to do better at messaging and
whatnot. We're working on that. All I ask is you give us a chance and don't
dismiss what we're doing as "just GeoDjango."

~~~
wooster
As someone who's built his own infrastructure, I'll respond.

1\. 30m requests/month is about 11.5 requests/second. My service can do 300
search requests/second sustained off of one machine. That's with a pretty
minimal setup. Data is backed up to S3. Multi-homing isn't a big priority for
me, but I could easily do it for not much effort/cost.

2\. If you're whitelisted, Twitter actually gives out 14.4 million calls a
month for free. If not, it's 111,600 calls per month. So, I'm not sure where
you're getting your numbers here.

3\. I've spent a lot of time building my service and API, but AFAICT you're
not providing an API I could vend directly to client applications I don't own
myself. Ditto on the premium content, which I can almost guarantee you don't
have the rights to give re-vending access for. (As in, I can't build a weather
API service on it and charge money. Same for business info.)

4\. How many of those POIs are license-free? Also, half a terabyte of point
data would be a lot, if you were actually indexing that much. I'd wager $1
you're counting non-point data in that number, such as addresses and the like.
That said, this is probably your strongest point,

5\. That's cool. It took me awhile to write my mapping engine, and I haven't
started on my AR view yet.

Honestly, your biggest problem seems to be that you don't describe your
service very well. If I were you, I'd be pitching this as a good way to build
up a service without the knowledge required to build a geo API in house,
negotiating with geodata vendors directly (who can be extremely standoffish
and unreasonable), and monitoring/scaling/etc the geodata side of things.

Also, the things I'd like to see, so that I don't have to build them myself,
would be:

1\. Worldwide address geocoding with no usage restrictions. AFAICT, this
service does not exist.

2\. Worldwide address canonicalization. If I'm missing a postal code,
province, etc, or if a phone number is in a weird format, I'd love a service
that would clean that up for me.

3\. Address unification among services. I'd love to be able to tie together
the primary ids of a given address among the various services: Yelp,
foursquare, Gowalla, OpenStreetMap, etc.

~~~
elblanco
> Also, the things I'd like to see, so that I don't have to build them myself,
> would be: 1\. Worldwide address geocoding with no usage restrictions.
> AFAICT, this service does not exist. 2\. Worldwide address canonicalization.
> If I'm missing a postal code, province, etc, or if a phone number is in a
> weird format, I'd love a service that would clean that up for me. 3\.
> Address unification among services. I'd love to be able to tie together the
> primary ids of a given address among the various services: Yelp, foursquare,
> Gowalla, OpenStreetMap, etc.

I think #1 and #2 here are the most interesting -- with really limited
providers to solve the problems. Address geolocation is a PIA, foreign address
geolocation is even worse.

A non-connected private version would also be worth something (lots of money
in the Government for this kind of service, usually not on the Internet).

------
bkudria
Their website is missing a clear and specific description of their service.

~~~
Raphael
Here's what we need front and center.

"SimpleGeo, in its most basic form, indexes data by location using latitude
and longitude so that you can easily search for things that are nearby. This
allows developers to easily scale, manage, and query their location data. On
top of this basic feature, SimpleGeo also provides rich location data, reverse
geocoding, and other tools to help developers leverage the location of their
users."

[http://help.simplegeo.com/faqs/company/what-would-i-use-
simp...](http://help.simplegeo.com/faqs/company/what-would-i-use-simplegeo-
for)

~~~
dcurtis
That's still a terrible description.

What makes location data "rich"? And how do developers use "rich location
data" to "leverage the location of their users?"

What exactly does it do?

~~~
pkaler
I did a talk with Matt Galligan when he was in Vancouver last month. You can
see the video here: <http://blip.tv/file/3340542/>

I can't seem to dig up a video of Matt's talk.

Basically, Navteq and Tele Atlas own the base map data. Google, Bing, and
MapQuest add intelligence on top of this data with features like Street View
and driving directions. Foursquare and Gowalla add another layer of
intelligence with where people and places are at right now.

Rich location data is the "what,when,why,who" is at this location.

SimpleGeo is: 1) Storage for location with metadata about what's at that
location 2) A marketplace to buy and sell data about locations

So, off the top of my head. I can create a door-to-door canvassing app and ask
residents if they are Democrats or Republicans. Then I could sell this data to
others that would be interested in this data.

------
jsdalton
Wow, that's expensive: <http://simplegeo.com/plans/>

~~~
albahk
I just got a beta invite and was planning to spend the weekend moving my real
estate listing data to the service to try it... at these prices I am happy to
do it myself.

I feel like the pricing is aimed at funded startups or mature businesses, not
bootstrapped startups.

The site design screams Metalab. Did they design it?

------
whalesalad
They've built a good API, but I don't know what it is either. I've been a beta
user for a little while, and was originally going to use it to store bus stops
in Honolulu county, to make finding nearby ones from your mobile phone
quicker. In my initial testing it returned all kinds of locations near me,
when all I wanted were those on my own "layer". I was getting coffee shops,
and all kinds of stuff. I guess that might be the intention? It was never
clear to me, and doing it locally was actually easier and faster (using
geopy). Just my $0.02.

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swombat
Umm... So I watched most of that video, thinking, they're going to show
something cool worth $2.5k/m to a start-up soon.

Like hell they did.

~~~
icey
$2.5k / month would buy you a lot of time with a developer doing GeoDjango
work.

~~~
swombat
Not only that, but I've just realised... $2.5k/m only gets you 10 times as
much as a free account. Sounds like such a great deal!

And then if you want THREE times as much as the start-up account, you have to
pay FOUR times as much - $10k for 30 million calls.

Maybe they should have hired a mathematician instead of geographers....

~~~
herewego
Not all services scale perfectly linearly. They are likely limited by certain
costs associated with using an Amazon infrastructure or their own
infrastructure, or it is simply a matter of customer hot spotting trends and
perceived demand.

------
Mark_F
Expensive! That's all I can say. I was imagining more like a $9.99/month plan.

~~~
benatkin
Me, too. I've heard them compared to S3 and Heroku. Their pricing plans aren't
like either of them.

I think we'll see them get changed big time, perhaps with grandfathering in of
the current free plan.

------
wicknicks
they seem to be doing something interesting, but documentation and company
statement is very vague. Even the demo code does not work out of the box. The
video on their homepage doesn't make any sense at all..

~~~
joestump
The video was location data we aggregated during SXSW for our vicarious.ly
visualization. We have lots of work to do on messaging and documentation.

What bugs did you find? We use the Python client internally and the iPhone SDK
is being used in production. Maybe post on <http://help.simplegeo.com>?

------
nl
They have niceish REST Apis, but only support OAuth for authentication. Have
you ever tried out an OAuth protected API from the browser? It's bloody hard!
(Google has their OAuth playground, but if there is something similar for
other sites I haven't seen it)

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sgarn
I started using SimpleGeo when it was in Beta and I was pretty amazed to see
the plans... way too expensive for a startup. I'll go back to GeoApi in a few.
Sad..

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elblanco
This looks really cool. I'll be checking back when more of the site is up to
get some more detailed information on the capabilities and the offering.

