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Comment by varikin | Hacker News Reader

The description makes it sound like SimpleGeo is in trouble, e.g. once promising, soft landing. Is there something more to this?

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Seeing how they raised nearly $10M in venture capital and sold for under $4M, it's safe to guess they sold because they were running out of money. The alternative was going out of business - that's a pretty hard landing.

I'm a geolocation fan and developer from a long time, so always watched and tested Simplegeo. But it seems they never got too much traction because their platform is very specific, even for geolocation systems (someone correct me if I'm wrong, please).

Yes, they have a pretty big apps showcase, but it's not enough sometimes.

Anyway, if they get acquired by Urban Airship, it will be great. UA will have a better use for their platform (and UA will need geolocation soon), and I'm happy Simplegeo will have a good use (what they built is really awesome, if you understand geolocation).

Kind of off topic, but can you recommend some services similar to simplegeo?

Disclosure: I work at Factual.

Factual provides an API for businesses in the US and around the world. In fact, SimpleGeo partnered with us for some of their data. Other alternatives you can consider are FourSquare, Google Places, etc. Each alternative has it's own pricing structure and terms and conditions.

You can browse some of our POI data by going to http://www.factual.com/topic/places

Foursquare is good for a simple and fast list of places, but the data inside that is incomplete sometimes.

This Factual is new to me and seems good, I will see it better later (big list of places for Brazil, exactly what I need sometimes).

I don't know any other service like Simplegeo.

MongoDB has some pretty good geo-aware methods worth looking.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Plac...

I was just looking into the geolocation issue myself recently. Looked at simplegeo but decided against it. The question really is what is your app going to do. The difficulty really with geolocation these days isnt the lack of data points rather its figuring out the needs of your application and whether or not these services will fit into that. In reality even with these services location based apps are still a pain to develop.

Couchbase now includes the GeoCouch R-tree indexer by default: http://blog.couchbase.com/new-release-geocouch-extension

This is the same indexer that is powering open gov't projects around the world: http://maxogden.com/#blog/diy-open-data-catalog

Urban Mapping - http://www.urbanmapping.com/ - for data [ http://developer.urbanmapping.com/content/Data-Catalog ] and custom map rendering [ http://www.urbanmapping.com/product/mapfluence ].

If you mean tech as opposed to their data offerings, you should take a look at CartoDB http://www.cartodb.com. All the power of PostGIS with a lot of the pain points rounded off.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Bimaple.com.

Bimaple provides powerful location-based search services. Check omniplaces.com for a demonstration site that supports instant, error-tolerant search on more than 17 million business listings. Customers can build a search application easily using our product.

Maybe the issue is barely anyone uses it? I'm guessing Foundry Group organized the acquisition between companies so SimpleGeo wouldn't totally fail and were unwilling to do another round.

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