August 2010
1 post
Announcing Polymaps
A few months ago we announced a partnership with Stamen Design, the best online mapping and data visualization company we know. It’s time to announce Polymaps, the first public milestone in that partnership, at http://polymaps.org.
We’ve been working with Stamen to provide visual analysis of the huge datasets that we’re working with, and how people can communicate this data in...
July 2010
7 posts
Updates to our Marketplace
Starting August 15th, we will start to enforcing users to accept a Terms of Service for access to every layer in the SimpleGeo Marketplace. This means that any layers you are currently using for which you haven’t added through the marketplace, particularly the com.simplegeo.global.* layers, will stop working. Any layer you’ve created privately will not be affected.
For the past few...
SimpleGeo at Geo-Loco 2010
Next week, we will be participating in Geo-Loco 2010, an event that focuses on the business and future of geo-location services. Use the code simplegeo20 to get a 20% discount on a ticket to the event.
As part of the festivities, we will be hosting a networking event on Tuesday night at our new San Francisco headquarters, located at 41 Decatur St.
There will be a guest list, so please make...
How to drop geo-tagged tweets into a SimpleGeo...
Last week, we showed you how to grab all of your checkins from Foursquare, and visualize them on a SimpleGeo layer.
Pablo Estrada forked that code and created a script that imports tweets from Twitter, using the tweepy Python Twitter client.
The script is available to download on Github. The Twitter API by default only returns 20 tweets at a time. You can add the count=200 parameter to max out...
Culture is Critical
I often like to joke that the dozen or so years I’ve spent working in and helping to build startups is the longest case study in how not to run a startup. Since starting SimpleGeo Matt and I have obsessed about culture. We spend a lot of time attempting to make SimpleGeo a great company to work for filled with wonderfully talented people working on difficult problems.
Recently, while...
Moving HQ
About a week ago Joe and I gathered the entire SimpleGeo team at our San Francisco offices for a week of team building, camaraderie, and hacking. It was also a time for our executive team to hammer out the basics of what SimpleGeo will be as a company moving forward. One thing quickly became clear during that week: SimpleGeo would be better off if Joe and I were in San Francisco full-time.
This...
Explore your Foursquare checkins on a map with...
If you are a Foursquare user, have you ever wanted to visualize all of your checkins on a map? Using your Foursquare RSS feed and a simple Python script, you can import all of your checkins to SimpleGeo’s API and do spatial queries on them.
Step 1: Login to your Foursquare account and visit the Feeds page.
Take note of your RSS feed. In my case, it...
On the hunt for a Data Scientist
We’ve got a lot of data at SimpleGeo. Sadly, our data is wandering through our server farms aimlessly in search of the meaning within itself. You know, the usual existentialist questions that data sets seem to have:
What do I mean?
Why was I written to disk?
Will I just end up as an input to some larger aggregate?
Should I wear XML or JSON today?
We’re becoming a bit worried here...
June 2010
6 posts
Hacking on earthquake data with Python
This week, a huge majority of the SimpleGeo crew is in San Francisco, hacking away on everything, including adding data to our Marketplace.
Yesterday, we added some data from recdata.gov, and today we are experimenting with the USGS Earthquake data catalog.
The dataset is updated by the USGS every few minutes, but for the purposes of this experiment, we’re just going to download the latest...
Marketplace: Recreation Information Database
The SimpleGeo Marketplace is an place for developers to share their data with the rest of the community.
A new free layer has just been added to the Marketplace from http://www.recdata.gov, and it’s called Recreation Information Database.
The layer includes U.S. campgrounds, parks, museums, historic sites, recreation sites, and other nature-related points of interest. There are roughly...
iOS 4.0 + SimpleGeo = Win
Apple’s announcement of offering applications the ability to receive location updates while running in the background has given SimpleGeo another reason to shine. There are many attractive use-cases that this new feature opens up. We’re happy to announce that iPhone developers can seamlessly update their endusers’ record whenever the device is sent into the background. Combine...
Living Up To Our Name
When I first accepted the job at SimpleGeo as VP of Product, the first thing I did was sit down with Joe and Matt and talk about our brand. I told them, “the way I see it, we have two choices: one, we change our name; or two, we work our asses off to live up to it.” See, I’ve known Matt and Joe for some time, and while I wasn’t involved in the creation of SimpleGeo, I’ve always been in the...
A look at our iPhone Augmented Reality SDK
Ever since the early days of CrashCorp, we have been working on an interactive augmented reality environment for the iPhone.
Last week, we released it to the public. You can fork it on Github.
The code is written on top of the OpenGL pipeline. The AR environment projects latitude and longitude coordinates into a 3D space. By calculating the distance and bearing from each point of interest,...
Anatomy of a good prank
It was recently announced that Jeffrey Kalmikoff is joining our team to head up product at SimpleGeo. Matt and I had been wooing Jeffrey as soon as we heard he’d left Digg. Of course, we weren’t the only ones wooing Jeffrey, which was causing Matt a great deal of stress over the thought of him choosing to work with someone else.
It all came down to a single day, which Jeffrey had...
May 2010
3 posts
Introducing Pushpin queries
The SimpleGeo API has three new endpoints that you can use today in our Python, PHP, Java, Objective-C, and Ruby clients.
[From Flickr - by mil8]
contains/
Does a “pushpin” query through a series of polygon layers and identifies the “cone” of administrative and other boundaries in which the point lies. (In geographic terms, a polygon is simply a collection of points...
SimpleGeo and Google's Latitude API
Photo thanks to TechCrunch
We all know geolocation is the current hotness on the web. Google has been a leader in location for a long time, starting with the launch of Google Maps in 2005. Since then, there have been lots of Google products that center around geo: Local, Latitude, Earth, etc. Today Google announced an API for Latitude. For those that haven’t heard of it, Latitude...
It's Been A Big Year
Matt and Joe: The humble beginnings of SimpleGeo at SXSW.
It’s been a year since Joe and Matt got started on CrashCorp, the precursor to SimpleGeo. What started out as an augmented reality gaming company is now an influential player in the geolocation space. Even in the last six months, we’ve made incredible progress. Between raising our seed round, hiring 15 employees, going...
April 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Easy as riding a bike: SimpleGeo API and iPhone...
This month, Apple announced a background location feature for the next generation of their iPhone platform, and developers are already starting to use it with SimpleGeo’s API.
Andre Navarro (@ecito) from Houston is one of the first to build something. While it’s quite simple, it’s still really cool to see the possibilities of what background location can do. Navarro tested out...
Announcing some changes
We’re about one month post-launch now and we’ve learned a LOT. Both internally and from our amazing users. Some comments like these really get us fired up:
amitm: Loving the simplicity of @simplegeoinc. Took all of 10 minutes to get location integrated into our upcoming game
cbmeeks: Man, you guys friggin’ rock
jtkendall: got the API for my app working thanks to...
Hiring a Designer and Front-End Engineer
We’re hiring for two new positions: A designer/creative director and a front-end engineer. Here’s the details:
Designer / Creative Director
Must live in or be willing to relocate to Boulder, CO
Must have at least 5+ years design experience
Can work as a one-man team
List of references, or portfolio
Experience with designing developer tools or a storefront a plus
Application...
iPhone OS 4, Background Location and SimpleGeo
Thanks to GDGT for the photos of the keynote.
At SimpleGeo, we’ve been very excited for what Apple was going to announce today. There has been all kinds of speculation as to what features were going to go into iPhone OS 4, but now the rumors are over and there are some very big changes coming to the iPhone world. While most of the features were expected, Apple threw us a few nice...
March 2010
7 posts
Announcing five new team members
We’ve been growing like a weed at SimpleGeo. When Matt and I started SimpleGeo I couldn’t have dreamed we’d be able to build the team we’ve managed to build. I’m excited to announce we’ve got five (FIVE!) great new team members starting at SimpleGeo in the coming weeks.
One area where Matt and I quickly identified a need for more brain power was on the...
"Getting More from Location Data" via MIT's Tech... →
Language wars at the office
Recently at SimpleGeo we had some issues with our RabbitMQ setup. This wasn’t really an issue with RabbitMQ per se, but an issue with how we’d laid out the architecture of it. It was brought up that maybe we should rewrite our consumers in a different language, which, of course, lead to a huge debate about which language we should switch to.
I’ve said this many times before, but...
"SimpleGeo targets app developers" via Boulder... →
"Boulder company SimpleGeo aims to make location... →
February 2010
2 posts
SimpleGeo Now Indexing 1m+ Locations Per Hour. →
SoftFacade discusses our icons on their blog. →
January 2010
3 posts
Announcing two new additions to the team
Over the last few months we’ve been fortunate to be able to hire four amazing engineers, so we’re excited to announce the two latest additions to our team, Joel Longtine and Wade Simmons, do not upset the trend. They will be joining the SimpleGeo family on February 1st.
Joel and Wade join us from AOL where they worked on AIM Lifestream, which grew out of AOL’s acquisition of...
Surround yourself with smart people
Last fall, Joe and I had met with Dan Shoutis to talk about the various kinds of things that we were up to, and get a greater understanding of how it might impact the overall Geo market. We had a fantastic conversation, and it was clear that Dan was an individual with an incredible sense of what’s up in the world of location.
So we had brainstormed just a bit and decided that, while it...
2 tags
Looking for some rock stars
Alright folks, it’s that time again and we’re hiring!
We’re looking to hire some rock stars to join up with the SimpleGeo team in Boulder, CO or San Francisco, CA and help build our business even bigger. If you’re a Biz Dev hustler or Developer Advocate / Relations guru, we’d love to talk to you!
Here’s the gist:
Business Development
At least 3-5 years making business development or...
December 2009
3 posts
Disk IO and throughput benchmarks on Amazon’s EC2 →
Just got this set up...
We’ll get some content up here shortly, but we wanted to get this up and running today. Enjoy!
