New Outside.in API Feature Zooms to News Around You. The use of location in applications is a key differentiator today. While the current craze towards Location Based Services is gravitated towards deals, coupons and services, we often overlook the most fundamental of them all i.e. the news in your vicinity. Outside.in, a location based news aggregator, has welcomed 2011 with enhancements to its Outside.in API that could give rise to a new set of hyperlocal news. In our earlier coverage of Outside.in, we noted that the API can help you search the news at macro levels like state, city, neighborhood and zip code. Just when it seemed that you could not narrow down the news event to a finer level, Outside.in announced a set of new API features.
It has introduced the Nearby parameter to their find stories by location. You can now retrieve stories within 1,000 feet of any latitude and longitude point in the United States. The API enhancements do not end there. News is one of the basic things that we all look for. Location’s Social Paradox. There’s an absolute eruption of activity around location-based services right now. Companies are getting funded left and right, new ones are popping up daily, and certain ones are seemingly starting to take off.
But for a number of them, there’s a very big wall looming. And the more popular they get, the quicker they’ll reach it. A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly interesting to me. I’ve written before that location is the missing link between social networks and the real world, and I absolutely believe that’s true. Of course, this problem is entirely my own fault. With these location-based social networks, more is actually worse, and that’s awkward.
There are a number of things that these networks could do to alleviate some of these lesser issues. Another service, Gowalla, also has Push Notifications, which are useful. API Directory - ProgrammableWeb. SimpleGeo: Ready-to-Use Location Infrastructure. Why startup SimpleGeo abandoned game making to sell location too. SimpleGeo is a Boulder-based startup now beta-testing its line of software development tools, cloud storage, and other must-haves for mobile application developers who want to easily build location-based services into their apps. The firm has gathered a $1.5 million first round of investment from familiar names in the Valley VC world. Co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan confirmed that bicoastal firm First Round Capital led the round.
A total of $1.3M in seed funding came from Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and a mostly well-known set of angels: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schacter, Debbie Landa, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fannning, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Lee, and David G. Cohen. Another $195,000 in debt funding came from Joanna Shields, David Liu, Ziv Navoth, Joanna Shields, Ravi Narasimhan, Jason Knapp, and Darius Contractor (yes, that’s his real name.) A typical layperson’s take on location-based apps is this comment on TechCrunch: “Does this have a future? SimpleGeo Company Profile. SimpleGeo Presents at Under the Radar Mobility 2009. SimpleGeo (formerly CrashCorp) Launched 2009, Boulder, CO Twitter: @simplegeo With only hints about what they’re up to available to the ‘rest of us’ for the past while, SimpleGeo finally came out of the bag at Under the Radar Mobility today to tell the world what they’re up to.
In case you missed it, here’s their presentation and company profile: Company Description | SimpleGeo provides end-to-end solutions to enable location-based services in mobile, web and desktop applications. SimpleGeo’s platform includes three current products; a geo-spatial Context Engine, Storage Engine and a comprehensive SDK. The SimpleGeo Context Engine enables application developers to quickly and easily get relevant information about specific locales including (but not limited to) ZIP codes, real-time weather, and geo-tagged media. Presenter | Matt Galligan | CEO Matt Galligan, 25, is the CEO and Co-Founder of SimpleGeo. SimpleGeo – 2009 LBS location simplegeo startup Under The Radar UTR. Post-Funding, SimpleGeo Pounces On A Six Aparter, A Hacker, And. Two weeks ago, SimpleGeo raised a $1.5 million seed round from just about every big angel investor in Silicon Valley. Not surprisingly, they’re already putting that money to good use. Before the funding, SimpleGeo was a team of four including co-founders Matt Galligan and Joe Stump.
As of today, they’re now 7, with the arrival of two new hires: Zooko (yes, that’s what he’s known as), a peer-to-peer hacker best known for his work on Mojo Nation, a precursor to BitTorrent. And Mike Malone, an engineer at Six Apart who was also instrumental in the building of Pownce, the since-deadpooled social messaging service. You can read more about Zooko on his Wikipedia page. The addition of Malone is vital to SimpleGeo as he’ll basically be the face of the company in Silicon Valley, Galligan says. At Six Apart, Malone was doing application development for the TypePad platform, building apps that run on top of the TypePad API. And obviously, the love is mutual. [photo of Malone by Andrew Mager]
De la géolocalisation en mode SaaS avec SimpleGeo - Blogue. GeoAPI.com - location infrastructure, GIS, and geo-location serv. Where I've Been API Profile. Location-API.com API Profile. Postcode IT API Profile. Gears Future APIs: Location API on Dion Almaer's Blog. Dec 21 I have spoken at a bunch of conferences in Europe this quarter. From the Future of Web Apps, and @mediaAjax in London, to JavaZone and JavaPolis in Oslo and Belgium. When I speak about Gears there, I get a lot of questions about Mobile Gears. A lot of the features of Gears arguably make even MORE sense on a mobile device. One very handy API to have would be a Location API (although it would be useful in other contexts too): The purpose of this API is to provide means to fetch the location of a device running a Web browser with Gears. Here is the API as a code example using it: I can imagine the fun games that I could write here, let alone the interesting business apps that could take the location context into consideration.
Other Future APIs Disclaimer: This is early days, and who knows what the final API will look like, or if it will even make it. Leave a Reply. API - praized - Project Hosting on Google Code. Joe Stump on data, APIs, and why location is up for grabs - O'Re. I recently had a long conversation with Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, about location, geodata, and the NoSQL movement. Stump, who was formerly lead architect at Digg, had a lot to say.
Highlights are posted below. You can find a transcript of the full interview here. Competition in the geodata industry: I personally haven’t seen anybody that has come out and said, “We’re actively indexing millions of points of data. We’re also offering storage and we’re giving tools to leverage that. How SimpleGeo stores location data: The way that we’ve gone about doing that is we’ actually have two clusters of databases. The virtues of keeping your data API simple: We started out with what we considered to be the most basic widely-needed use case for developers, which is simply “my users here tell me about points of data that are within a certain radius of where my user’s sitting.” Why NoSQL is gaining in popularity: The role of social networking in the demise of SQL:
Joe Stump on data, APIs, and why location is up for grabs - O'Re. It’s Time For An Open Database Of Places. With last week’s declaration by Twitter that it intends to start identifying places based on the coordinates of geo-coded Tweets, the location land rush is in full swing. A long list of companies including Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, and Citysearch are far along in creating separate databases of places mapped to their geo-coordinates. Mapping businesses, in particular, to the GPS locations near where people are checking in, Tweeting from or pegging a photo is the first step to be able to show them geo-targeted ads, which could help fuel local mobile online advertising in a major way.
Here is the problem: These efforts at creating an underlying database of places are duplicative, and any competitive advantage any single company gets from being more comprehensive than the rest will be short-lived at best. It is time for an open database of places which all companies and developers can both contribute to and borrow from. Image: Flickr/Nate Bolt.