SimpleGeo To Be Acquired By Urban Airship

It's been bumpy, even with relying on them scantly–I had hoped the feature set would grow and mature to take even more work off of my hands. Instead–several times the API changed from under me without warning or backwards compatibility and my alpha app simply broke. Once, embarrassingly in an investor presentation, another time it took a personal tweet to the founders to get things re-sorted out.

I'm sad that for so much money, such a great team, excellent visual design, hot shot investors etc. they didn't take off. I wonder if they just didn't hit on the right business model–for me it seemed I am something of a YCombinator gamble for them: they want my startup Kliq to be reliant on their services such that I can't or don't want to rebuild at scale (wasn't the case), price such that they take money from me Kliq now, as small developer team with little time to build cookie features not core to my app (they didn't charge us a monthly fee until the very very end, while we probably would have paid $5-$20 a month right away and up to $50 with more features), and price such that they "exit" with Kliq if we do end up scaling. Then they just need some success stories and they would have been too. Some ideas as a now former "customer".

Today I’m excited to the acquisition of SimpleGeo. You can read Jay Adelson’s post here. [Dead link]

Both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo started two and a half years ago and I’ll never forget when Crash Corp Inc. (the original SimpleGeo) launched as we both went live with our new sites on the same day with the same font; Museo. We’ve known each other over that entire time and shared lots of discussions and even did a partnership deal in the last couple of months. As we continued to talk and engage we realized that putting our two companies together would make for a really interesting offering for our combined customers.

We’ve learned that our customers (brands, retailers, etailers, media, social networking sites, games and others) want more than just generic tools. Instead of building blocks they want a complete solution that can be used by the entire company to help engage, monetize, locate and understand their mobile user base. Urban Airship will fold in the SimpleGeo product suite to offer a complete set of solutions for our ever growing customer base. Urban Airship is now the leading platform for mobile cloud services in the market. This is a fantastic win for both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo customers and investors.

Obviously there are many things that we need to work out while we make this transition and we’ll be working closely with existing customers from both companies to make sure they are up to speed on our future plans for the combined roadmap.

We’re excited to be continuing to build the business, excited that the SG team is joining Urban Airship, excited about having an office in San Francisco and most of all excited about the next phase of PaaS that we’re going to dominate in years to come.

You can still read it through Google Reader: http://cl.ly/3j0T36272H2r3J0r1N0Q

Original URL: http://urbanairship.com/blog/2011/10/31/urban-airship-acquir...

Very unlikely, the team probably got a chunk.

Remember that the acquiring company is shelling out several million and they really don't give a rat's behind about the liquidity preference. They want the new team to be motivated.

It is standard for the VCs to waive the preference during the negotiations (after much wheedling and whining). If they don't, the deal doesn't go down.

I hope it lives on with Urban Airship and keeps getting resources to improve. In the end it's a good thing that someone is competing with Google in this space.

There are a great group of people at SimpleGeo, and while I never understood how it would be a big business, I was always confident that if a big opportunity existed, they would find it. What this says to me is that the big opportunity in being the data layer for location does not exist as a stand-alone entity.