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Urban Airship to shut down SimpleGeo
- mikeocool 15y agoReally 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 15y agozillow distributes free kml files for the neighborhood boundaries. Edit: here is the link http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm
- mikeocool 15y agoYeah, 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 15y agoThat link is old, but another resource to look into is http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/
- neovive 15y agoIs there a good implementation guide for using the kml data to lookup a neighborhood given a lat,lng? I considered the Zillow files prior to using SimpleGeo, but implementing a spatial database in MySQL seemed very complex in comparison to a simple CURL request. Perhaps, this is worth another look.
- brianbreslin 15y agoAnyone know of any sites using SimpleGeo for their location infrastructure?
- kickme444 15y agoWe use it at reddit/redditgifts. Really bummed.
- HectorRamos 15y agoWe were using it in a yet to be released iPhone app as part of a venue locator. Specifically, we had various Storage layers with venues and other points of interest. Our client would have been able to add and remove POIs easily without updating the iOS app, layers could be turned off and on, etc. Now we must use local static data, we're just a couple of weeks away from release and can't really afford to switch our location backend.
- andrewem 15y agoI'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 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 15y agoHi 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.html http://devcenter.spacialdb.com/Layers-API-v1-Documentation.h...) 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)
- sunkencity 15y agoI 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 http://softfacade.com/simplegeo.html
- d_r 15y agoThanks 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.
- nhangen 15y agoSo 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...
- ojbyrne 15y agoEngineers other than the founders?
- evgen 15y agoThey could have just been hired directly. Why bother acquiring if you have no interest in 1) the IP, 2) the founders or management team, or 3) the customers?
- maratd 15y agoIt's not that simple to hire. They acquired a team specialized in geolocation that worked together for a while. Might be worth its weight in gold.
- petrichor 15y agothey are going to use the tech, just as a feature of their push product, rather than as its own offering.
- pnathan 15y agoYeah, the straightforward reading is that they are folding the tech into their flagship product instead of running multiple products.
- nhangen 15y agoThat'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.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago> 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 15y ago> 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?
- hapless 15y agoThe free service etc are lovely perks, but a year of notice would be nice.
- runako 15y ago3 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/311996-simplegeo-migration-options https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31...) 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.
- earl 15y agoSimpleGeo building an innovative service and then abandoning its paying users well, that's what companies do when they fail, go out of business, or are acquihired, ie a business failure by another name
- mkramlich 15y ago(cough) acquhire
- AznHisoka 15y agoWe all know SimpleGeo was a failure. It doesn't count as an acquisition. It failed, and the founders moved on to Urban Airship.
- HectorRamos 15y agoThe co-founders left to work on new ventures. There's Joe Stump's Sprint.ly, and Matt Galligan's Circa.
- X-Istence 15y agoFor anyone that is trying to find something on Circa ... seems it is still in stealth. Might save you some time Googling.
- indiekid 15y agoTo be fair, that's not true at all. It was an acquisition in every sense of the word at the time. SimpleGeo, customers, tech and team were acquired (apart from us founders).
- quadlock 15y agoWas SimpleGeo not profitable? Is there a particular part of the service that is more popular?
- runako 15y agoIt 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 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 should folks have been looking for here? I'm interested in objective measures that one might reasonably use in evaluating vendors. I'm specifically not interested in things like how many/few job postings they run on Stack Overflow, the chatter at the last San Jose Ruby Meetup, VC blog posts, etc.
- jqueryin 15y agoAre 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 http://skookum.com Sorry for the shameless plug, but it's mutually beneficial if time is tight.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- seanmccann 15y agoWe 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/311996-simplegeo-migration-options https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hopeless 15y agoIt'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.
- neovive 15y agoI 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.
- twidlit 15y agoAny good alternative to SimpleGeo? Is Factual even the same?
- logn 15y agoquote from article: "Factual has been providing SimpleGeo with their Places data since June 2011"
- melvinmt 15y ago"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 http://www.quora.com/Why-did-SimpleGeo-fail
- geogeek 15y agoI 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 15y agoNot 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.
- dravnic 15y agoSG alternative for geo storage, query and visualization: http://www.giscloud.com/ http://www.giscloud.com/ http://dev.giscloud.com/RestGuide http://dev.giscloud.com/RestGuide http://dev.giscloud.com/RestApiReference http://dev.giscloud.com/RestApiReference