Hi, I'm the CTO and cofounder of SimpleGeo. Many of your points about sparse documentation, website, etc. are fair. We're about 3 hours old so give us a little time to fill everything in. Lots of work to do here, which is why we hired Andrew Mager to be a developer advocate.
1. You can think of us as S3 for location data. Before S3 scaling file storage was a messy, complex, and costly proposition. After S3 it was as simple as posting files to an endpoint. We do this for geometric/location data. We store and index your data and allow you to easily do geospatial queries against your location data.
2. We give away 1m calls a month, which is the same that Twitter gives away for free, and more than Google Maps does. The pricing plans are based on what it'd cost to manage your own infrastructure. We'll be adding lots more features, options, data, etc. in the coming weeks/months.
3. To the people saying they can just install GeoDjango and PostGIS, I have a few questions. How much time are you spending building and maintaining your own location API? How much does it cost to rent/buy that hardware? Is your location infrastructure multi-homed in three data centers? Does your location infrastructure come with premium content like global weather data and 16m+ business listings? Can it keep up with the real-time geohose from Twitter? Does it do URL callbacks and S3 backups automatically? We handle all of that for you.
4. The location marketplace will allow developers to tap into billions of points of interest and previously unattainable features for low monthly costs. For instance, Metacarta and Quova solutions are very much enterprise solutions that cost real money, but they'll be available on demand for small per-drink/per-month costs. We've indexed over half a terabyte of location data (when you're talking about point data that's a lot) that's instantly available to developers.
5. We have robust SDKs for the iPhone, including an augmented reality view. The AR view allows you to show a sophisticated AR view of your data, in our API, in about ~10 lines of code.
You all are absolutely right that we need to do better at messaging and whatnot. We're working on that. All I ask is you give us a chance and don't dismiss what we're doing as "just GeoDjango."
As someone who's built his own infrastructure, I'll respond.
1. 30m requests/month is about 11.5 requests/second. My service can do 300 search requests/second sustained off of one machine. That's with a pretty minimal setup. Data is backed up to S3. Multi-homing isn't a big priority for me, but I could easily do it for not much effort/cost.
2. If you're whitelisted, Twitter actually gives out 14.4 million calls a month for free. If not, it's 111,600 calls per month. So, I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers here.
3. I've spent a lot of time building my service and API, but AFAICT you're not providing an API I could vend directly to client applications I don't own myself. Ditto on the premium content, which I can almost guarantee you don't have the rights to give re-vending access for. (As in, I can't build a weather API service on it and charge money. Same for business info.)
4. How many of those POIs are license-free? Also, half a terabyte of point data would be a lot, if you were actually indexing that much. I'd wager $1 you're counting non-point data in that number, such as addresses and the like. That said, this is probably your strongest point,
5. That's cool. It took me awhile to write my mapping engine, and I haven't started on my AR view yet.
Honestly, your biggest problem seems to be that you don't describe your service very well. If I were you, I'd be pitching this as a good way to build up a service without the knowledge required to build a geo API in house, negotiating with geodata vendors directly (who can be extremely standoffish and unreasonable), and monitoring/scaling/etc the geodata side of things.
Also, the things I'd like to see, so that I don't have to build them myself, would be:
1. Worldwide address geocoding with no usage restrictions. AFAICT, this service does not exist.
2. Worldwide address canonicalization. If I'm missing a postal code, province, etc, or if a phone number is in a weird format, I'd love a service that would clean that up for me.
3. Address unification among services. I'd love to be able to tie together the primary ids of a given address among the various services: Yelp, foursquare, Gowalla, OpenStreetMap, etc.
> Also, the things I'd like to see, so that I don't have to build them myself, would be:
1. Worldwide address geocoding with no usage restrictions. AFAICT, this service does not exist.
2. Worldwide address canonicalization. If I'm missing a postal code, province, etc, or if a phone number is in a weird format, I'd love a service that would clean that up for me.
3. Address unification among services. I'd love to be able to tie together the primary ids of a given address among the various services: Yelp, foursquare, Gowalla, OpenStreetMap, etc.
I think #1 and #2 here are the most interesting -- with really limited providers to solve the problems. Address geolocation is a PIA, foreign address geolocation is even worse.
A non-connected private version would also be worth something (lots of money in the Government for this kind of service, usually not on the Internet).
I'm really surprised by the cost as well. I develop ArcGIS Server apps for a living, and basic software licensing to do anything interesting is equivalent to 2 months of service at SimpleGeo. And the ESRI data ecosystem is far larger than what SimpleGeo is providing.
I was hoping to see a product targeted at small businesses, but honestly I don't see the appeal. There's a great opportunity to fill in the market gap that ESRI is ignoring, but ESRI will no doubt be rolling out cloud services soon too. I guess we'll have to wait and see how this pans out.
You're saying geometric data, but it's only points right? Is "GiselleDB" B-Trees on the geohash? And spatial queries are limited to 'nearby' so far, right?
1. You can think of us as S3 for location data. Before S3 scaling file storage was a messy, complex, and costly proposition. After S3 it was as simple as posting files to an endpoint. We do this for geometric/location data. We store and index your data and allow you to easily do geospatial queries against your location data.
2. We give away 1m calls a month, which is the same that Twitter gives away for free, and more than Google Maps does. The pricing plans are based on what it'd cost to manage your own infrastructure. We'll be adding lots more features, options, data, etc. in the coming weeks/months.
3. To the people saying they can just install GeoDjango and PostGIS, I have a few questions. How much time are you spending building and maintaining your own location API? How much does it cost to rent/buy that hardware? Is your location infrastructure multi-homed in three data centers? Does your location infrastructure come with premium content like global weather data and 16m+ business listings? Can it keep up with the real-time geohose from Twitter? Does it do URL callbacks and S3 backups automatically? We handle all of that for you.
4. The location marketplace will allow developers to tap into billions of points of interest and previously unattainable features for low monthly costs. For instance, Metacarta and Quova solutions are very much enterprise solutions that cost real money, but they'll be available on demand for small per-drink/per-month costs. We've indexed over half a terabyte of location data (when you're talking about point data that's a lot) that's instantly available to developers.
5. We have robust SDKs for the iPhone, including an augmented reality view. The AR view allows you to show a sophisticated AR view of your data, in our API, in about ~10 lines of code.
You all are absolutely right that we need to do better at messaging and whatnot. We're working on that. All I ask is you give us a chance and don't dismiss what we're doing as "just GeoDjango."