11 ms·

SimpleGeo Launches

44 points by kingkilr 17y ago

whalesalad 17y ago
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.
swombat 17y ago
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 17y ago
  $2.5k / month would buy you a lot of time with a developer doing GeoDjango work.
  - swombat 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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 17y ago
Expensive! That's all I can say. I was imagining more like a $9.99/month plan.
- benatkin 17y ago
  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.
bkudria 17y ago
Their website is missing a clear and specific description of their service.
- wdewind 17y ago
  I agree. After reading around a little I SORT of get what it does, but not really.
- Raphael 17y ago
  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-simplegeo-for http://help.simplegeo.com/faqs/company/what-would-i-use-simp...
  - swombat 17y ago
    They have a better one on their blog: "SimpleGeo is a ready-to-use location infrastructure that makes it dead simple to make your app location aware." http://blog.simplegeo.com/ http://blog.simplegeo.com/
  - dcurtis 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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/ 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 17y ago
Wow, that's expensive: http://simplegeo.com/plans/ http://simplegeo.com/plans/
- albahk 17y ago
  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?
wicknicks 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 http://help.simplegeo.com?
joestump 17y ago
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."
- eknuth 17y ago
  I love geodjango and postgis, but it's a lot of overhead. I've been following the simplegeo stuff, and it seems pretty cool.
- herewego 17y ago
  From someone who lives and develops in the real world, your prices, current offerings, and future offerings are right on the mark. Simply GeoDjango you are not. Nice job.
nl 17y ago
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)
elblanco 17y ago
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.
sgarn 17y ago
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..

44 points by kingkilr 17y ago

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.

swombat 17y ago

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 17y ago
$2.5k / month would buy you a lot of time with a developer doing GeoDjango work.
- swombat 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago

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

benatkin 17y ago
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.

bkudria 17y ago

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

wdewind 17y ago
I agree. After reading around a little I SORT of get what it does, but not really.
Raphael 17y ago
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-simplegeo-for http://help.simplegeo.com/faqs/company/what-would-i-use-simp...
- swombat 17y ago
  They have a better one on their blog: "SimpleGeo is a ready-to-use location infrastructure that makes it dead simple to make your app location aware." http://blog.simplegeo.com/ http://blog.simplegeo.com/
- dcurtis 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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/ 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 17y ago

Wow, that's expensive: http://simplegeo.com/plans/ http://simplegeo.com/plans/

albahk 17y ago
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?

wicknicks 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 http://help.simplegeo.com?

joestump 17y ago

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."

eknuth 17y ago
I love geodjango and postgis, but it's a lot of overhead. I've been following the simplegeo stuff, and it seems pretty cool.
herewego 17y ago
From someone who lives and develops in the real world, your prices, current offerings, and future offerings are right on the mark. Simply GeoDjango you are not. Nice job.

nl 17y ago

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)

elblanco 17y ago

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.

sgarn 17y ago

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..