Today is a big day for us here at SimpleGeo! There are a couple reasons for this…

First, we relaunched all of our non-login-required properties including our Website and Company Blog. We’ve moved our Help and Support property over to Zendesk, which launched today as well. Using a styled version of the actual Zendesk site is a temporary solution while we finish building our Zendesk API-powered custom help site over the next few months.

We’re also launching a new property later this week called the Status Blog, which allows our developer community to easily keep up-to-date with the health of our services (using Twilio’s open-source Stashboard) and see any related information associated with that.

Our API Documentation is temporarily being included in our Zendesk implementation but is being broken out into a dedicated API Documentation site. That’s launching in the next few weeks. You’ll also notice re-themed pages for our @simplegeo and @simplegeoapi Twitter accounts.

Today’s push is the first step towards the full launch of our core products and services in the Fall. When those launch, we’ll also launch a newer full-featured website (the one we launched today is more-or-less an interim site). We’ll also be fully overhauling the UI & UX of everything post-login such the user Dashboard and Data Library by the end of the year.

Hang tight, we’re just getting started…

The second reason today is so exciting is because it’s the day that we fully commit to externalizing the policy of honesty and transparency which is a core value internally.

That being said, the site that launched today makes a few things very clear: (1) we’re working on building a suite of great products and services, but we’re not done yet, and (2) just because we’re not done yet doesn’t mean that there aren’t solid pieces for developers to start building off of – particularly iPhone developers at this time.

We highly encourage all you iPhone developers out there to sign up for a free beta account and start playing with our iPhone SDK. There’s some really awesome stuff in there. The new site includes screencasts that walk you through adding and retrieving records, adding augmented reality, and leveraging iOS4’s background location with both our Geofencing service and Pushpin API endpoint.

As the head of Product, the transparent messaging on the new site is something that I find to be crucial to our product process as it relates to the health of our developer community. It’s not about under-promising and over-delivering, it’s about being up front and clear about your progress. It’s about making your intentions known and letting people peer into the windows of your workshop and watch you build. It’s about full disclosure because we have nothing to hide.

We strongly believe that there is nothing wrong with not being done – there’s only a problem with launching weak products. We are building kick-ass products for developers, and we will be the force to be reckoned with in the location space… once we’re at a solid point with our products and services that we can continue to iterate on and innovate with.

We couldn’t be more proud of the progress we’re making, and are literally giddy to fully launch our API Toolkit, Data Library, and Infrastructure products out of beta in the Fall.

The rest of 2010 and beyond will be super exciting for SimpleGeo and our developer community as we push out of beta and continue to launch new products and features.

We look forward to keeping you updated along the way!

Jeffrey KalmikoffVP of Product