Joestump onTwitter Founder Simplegeoinc... Zooko (zooko) Matt Galligan (mg) Derek Smith (dsmitts) Michael Malone (mjmalone) 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. Galligan says people unfamiliar with the details of location-based app development underestimate the value of software tools for developers. A typical layperson’s take on location-based apps is this comment on TechCrunch: “Does this have a future?
SimpleGeo $1.5 Million And Many Big Name Investors. There is a lot of buzz around SimpleGeo right now. The service, which participated in our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, also took home two prizes at the Under The Radar conference just prior to that. And that was a big deal for the company considering it won the audience award even though it’s not exactly the most consumer-oriented project. But people seem to understand that the location space is getting really hot right now, and SimpleGeo, which provides its geolocation infrastructure to other companies, offers one of the best models to capitalize on that. So it should be no surprise that they’ve attracted some big time investors. SimpleGeo has just closed a $1.5 million seed round of funding, we’ve confirmed. The two founders, Matt Galligan and Joe Stump, who are both based in Boulder, CO, used their time in San Francisco this month to close this new round.
SimpleGeo is not the only company working to provide an easy way for others to tap into the location craze. SimpleGeo Founder Joe Stump Talks Up Location-As-A-Service (Video) I had the chance to sit down with Joe Stump, former Lead Architect at Digg who recently co-founded a startup called SimpleGeo, at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. We’ve covered the company he started with Matt Galligan (of Socialthing fame) a number of times in the past, but I was interested to learn how things were working out for the fledgling startup, which is looking to capitalize on the location craze (some call it a war, Stump calls it a gold rush) by delivering relevant infrastructure services.
Think Amazon S3 for geodata. Stump tells me that the company, which has raised a little over $1.5 million in funding from an impressive list of high-profile investors, now counts 13 employees, almost all of which are engineers. SimpleGeo is based in Boulder, Colorado, but will be opening an office in San Francisco in June. The company has attracted about 2,700 application developers to sign up for the beta, and added between 1,000 and 1,500 more in recent times.
Location Isn’t A War Between Two Sides, It’s A Gold Rush For Everyone. Editor’s note: This post was written by Joe Stump, the co-founder of SimpleGeo, a geolocation infrastructure company. While much of the focus in location these days is on the front-end side of things, SimpleGeo focuses on the backend, allowing startups to very easily get started with geolocation. There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “war” between Gowalla and Foursquare. Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush. My cofounder, Matt Galligan, and I firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole new view of the data we consume every day. Over the course of almost 10 years we’ve seen social get baked into everything from photo sharing to financial tools. 1. 2.
So who’s going to win? I can’t wait. Brendan O'Connor (USSJoin) SimpleGeo Now Indexing 1m+ Locations Per Hour. Location is going to be big, that seems to be the consensus among geeks, but just how big is it going to be? One metric to wrap your brain around came out over Twitter earlier today. According to SimpleGeo founder Joe Stump, the still-unlaunched but much anticipated service is now indexing more than 1 million location-based objects every hour. That's going to make for a very rich database that other services can tap into.
SimpleGeo has taken $1.5m in angel funding from of Silicon Valley's biggest-name investors to try and become the go-to geolocation database resource for the next generation of location-aware applications. The company was founded by former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and the founder of AOL-acquired Social Thing Matt Galligan. Stump explained his company's model to VentureBeat late last year: "Location-based devices only provide a latitude and a longitude, sometimes an altitude," he said. Location Labs. Location_Labs. Chaîne de locationlabs. Blog Announcing Polymaps. PolyMaps Examples. SimpleGeo launches PolyMaps, a JavaScript library for colorful maps. SimpleGeo and Stamen Design have partnered to produce Polymaps, a JavaScript library for image- and vector-tiled maps using SVG, that can be used by developers to build dynamic mapping apps. According to the website, “Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing” and other image-based web maps.
In a blog post, SimpleGeo said that the project has been available online as source code on Github for awhile, but now they’ve officially launched the service. Stamen Design is also helping SimpleGeo with its API as well. You can check out some examples of the visualizations on the website, like the one below: For more info on SimpleGeo, read our in-depth interview with CEO Matt Galligan.