Q: Who is Urban Airship (UA)?

A: Urban Airship is the leading maker of tools that brands use to engage consumers on mobile. For more information please go to http://urbanairship.com

Q: Why did UA acquire SimpleGeo (SG)?

A: SimpleGeo and Urban Airship have had a partnership since last summer. In our partnership discussions, we quickly realized that the power of both companies together resulted in products neither company could offer on its own, or in short, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Q: How will I benefit from this acquisition?

A: The combined company will bring push notifications, in-app purchasing, subscriptions, context and geo-location together on a single platform that gives brands what they need to make the most sense and money from their mobile/local strategies.

Q: You announced some joint products in July, saying they would be out in the fall – is this that? Is it still coming this fall?

A: As we began building the products from our joint announcement it became obvious that there was a bigger opportunity. We are undertaking a more comprehensive combination of our product lines which will include the majority of what we previously announced, but in a much more streamlined and effective way for our users. We’re eager to get these new products in front of our users and will be providing advance information to key customers. Look for a more complete product announcement about general availability in early 2012.

Q: Is this going to slow down the roadmap for feature X (at either company)?

A: We’ve made commitments at both companies to our customers about specific additions to our product lines, and intend to honor those. The combined engineering team will also focus on new efforts in parallel.

Q: I just need to store lots of location data, how does this affect me?

A: You can continue to use SimpleGeo’s existing products as they are available today. We will be making some product and pricing changes which we will announce in early 2012. If you have a specific use-case you want to talk to us about please don’t hesitate to contact us directly if you’re unsure about its future support. Our contact form is the best place to do so - http://urbanairship.com/company/contact/

Q: I was about to signup for SG, but now I don’t know – will you change this on me in 3 months?

A: We will be making some changes to the Products and Pricing, but will make every effort to honor existing installations and setups. If you have a specific use-case you want to talk to us about please don’t hesitate to contact us directly if you’re unsure about its future support. Our contact form is the best place to do so - http://urbanairship.com/company/contact/

Q: Are you going to keep the same SG Products as they have now?

A: These are likely to change in some way but we won’t have more information until early 2012. We’ll make every effort to honor current commitments and make the transition easy and cost effective for clients of SimpleGeo.

Q: How does this impact the SG deal with Factual? Is that data still available?

A: We don’t anticipate any changes to the types of data available within current SG products. If that changes, our customers will be the first to know. Look for new product announcements in early 2012.

Q: I have contributed open source code to SG projects, who owns that now?

A: UA is a strong proponent of Open Source, any contributions you’ve made will be honored under the contribution agreement you agreed to with SG.

Q: Are you still going to keep projects open sourced?

A: UA strives to open source as much code as makes sense, and we will continue that tradition.

Q: Where can I get support for SG products that are live in my app now?

A: Please continue to make use of the current SimpleGeo support forums and emails. As we begin the process of combining these communities, we’ll let you know in advance of any changes in the location of support resources.

Q: Are you going to raise the prices?

A: It’s too early for us to know how we may chance the products or prices. We will communicate any changes well in advance to our customers and plan to have more information available in early 2012.

Q: I am a customer of both UA & SG, do I need to change anything? Will I still get two bills? Who is the ultimate billing entity?

A: You do not need to change anything right now. We will combine the billing process at some point, and we will communicate any changes to existing account holders with plenty of time to make the change. Until then continue to use the systems as you have been.

Q: I have UA and/or SG libraries embedded within my app, do I need to upgrade to a new combined one? Keep using the old stuff?

A: We likely will combine these libraries but you don’t need to do anything yet. We’ll let you know what the best upgrade path is when it’s available, and will make the combination as seamless as possible.

Q: What happens to SimpleGeo’s SF offices?

A: Urban Airship remains headquartered in Portland. The San Francisco office is located in SOMA – a booming location for mobile startups, and we fully intend to keep it open and continue to add engineering talent.

Q: SG/UA has a bad bug Y, when are you going to fix that?

A: We hate bugs too! Please continue to follow up with our support channels on issues that are affecting you, and we will always do our best to resolve it. If you’re not happy, we’re not happy.

Q: Where do I go if I have a question?

A: Please continue to use the existing support and contact forms and forums for each product (http://support.urbanairship.com and http://simplegeo.com/help). We’ll handle making sure the message gets to the right person, so no need to change your contacts.

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(…or, a cartographer and a pilot walk into a bar…)

Last summer, we announced a partnership with Urban Airship to bring location-aware mobile messaging services to app developers. We both knew it was going to be a great marriage… Partnered together, we have an extremely strong offering that customers such as The Weather Channel and others have combined into their solutions. Think about it: When, and under what circumstances, do you push notifications? Location-awareness is a big piece of that, our developers get it, and so do their millions of users.

As we worked together to offer integrated offerings, things got really exciting! The promise of what we do combined with what Urban Airship does was inspiring. Our engineering teams met frequently and our whiteboards were riddled with product ideas. It became clear to us that together, we could create services much, much bigger than just push notifications and location! So, simple as that, I’m thrilled to announce that we have decided to combine the two companies.

The new company will operate under the Urban Airship name which has built a strong presence with more than 20,000 customers. While we will continue the joint offering we currently have under our relationship, I am especially excited about the product roadmap we have developed together that utilizes SimpleGeo’s technology within Urban Airship’s platform.

For those of you currently using SimpleGeo, nothing will change. Our Context, Places and Storage products will continue to be offered alongside the new combined offerings. In addition, the combined company already has a roadmap of exciting new ideas that we think will blow minds.

It’s a big day here at SimpleGeo, now Urban Airship. Scott Kveton, Urban Airship’s CEO, will take over running the company, so this powerful thing we’ve built is in very, very capable hands. In addition, I’ll remain an advisor to the company along with SimpleGeo’s founders, Joe Stump and Matt Galligan. We know you’ll be as enthused about this as we are. Stay tuned for more details as they emerge!

Here’s a press release with more details, and here’s a link to the Urban Airship blog post. If you have any questions, please let us know at contact@simplegeo.com!

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SimpleGeo got a rockin’ surprise yesterday from the band Blink-182. They posted their new album “Neighborhoods” online in a free stream for you to listen with your neighbors. Using SimpleGeo Context, fans are able to see and chat with other people listening in their neighborhood, city, or state. We thought this was cool – and apparently so did a lot of other people. On Twitter, the link was shared with over 3 million people by fans, the band, and their record label – and that was all before it was picked up by the press!

Spin Magazine picked it up: “The website streaming Neighborhoods asks listeners to share their location then chat with their neighbors as the album plays.”

As well as The Next Web: “Thanks to a SoundCloud and SimpleGeo mashup, you can listen to the new album in your own “Neighborhood”, which is the name of the feature. Using SimpleGeo‘s GPS technology, it will locate your neighborhood through your browser and drop you in a chat experience with SoundCloud‘s listening technology.”

Lee Martin is the developer behind the project, so we reached out and asked him a few questions:

Why SimpleGeo? “I’ve always been a huge fan of what SimpleGeo is doing. I mean, platform-based companies rock. (I work for one too) However, I never really had an idea that needed the breathe of what SimpleGeo offered around location data until this very problem. The band was lacking assets to do anything truly compelling around their premiere so we reworked the theme of the record itself into the solution you see today. Using SG’s Javascript SDK, I was able to pull the idea together programming remote in a hotel room in about 48 hours. You can’t ask for anything better in a platform’s endpoints and documentation.”

How easy was it to implement? “Honestly, I had a blast. It’s such an idea generator when you see just how much data is made available. Once you’ve got it all setup and running you just can’t help but want to figure out how to implement weather data into the project. Special props to the “boundary” data you can pull about pretty much any city, state, country, and neighborhood. Oh and it’s seamless integration to PolyMaps!”

This is definitely an awesome project, and we’re always excited to see our services used in creative ways. If you’re building something awesome with SimpleGeo, let us know! We may just highlight you here too!

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Today, I’m officially stepping down from my day-to-day duties as Chief Strategy Officer at SimpleGeo.

This place has been my home, and as one of its founders, I have a deep connection to SimpleGeo and always will. My co-workers have become my friends, my family. While I won’t be employed by SimpleGeo anymore, I will continue to advise on strategy and work with Jay Adelson, CEO, Joe Stump, CTO, and the rest of the team.

I’m one of SimpleGeo’s biggest advocates, so whatever my plans are, rest assured I will be doing everything possible to help make SimpleGeo successful! The team has been on a roll lately releasing plenty of new features and it’s been exciting to see all of them roll out. I’m even more excited about what’s down the pipe for our products.

It’s been a pleasure and an honor working with the SimpleGeo team and interacting with our partners and the development community. Thank you, all.

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Hello from SimpleGeo HQ! We’ve been hard at work, cranking away at great new features and services which are coming down the pipe over the next few months. In order to support those new features and services, we’re making some adjustments to a few areas that we wanted to let you know about.

To start, we wanted to give an update on how things are looking in our development community. We’ve doubled the number of developers using SimpleGeo products in the last six months, and now have over 15,000 developers on the SimpleGeo platform. We’ve also seen a lot of excellent uses of our products in applications across multiple platforms – both mobile and web. Check out what developers using our products have been up to by visiting the SimpleGeo App Showcase.

We also wanted to update you on the progress of integrating Factual place data into our Places API. The SimpleGeo and Factual teams have been hard at work getting the data ready for your consumption via our API, and that will be ready for public use in the next few weeks. If you missed the announcement of this partnership, you can read about it here – SimpleGeo and Factual Form Strategic Partnership to Deliver Places Data.

We’ve very excited about releasing the Factual data through our Places API because we’ll hit the ground running with 17M US POIs followed by POI data from 44 other countries.

Next, after much deliberation, we’ve decided to change the way we handle our pricing. This decision was ultimately based upon three main factors. The first, and most important to us, is customer feedback. We’ve received an overwhelming response that per-sip pricing was too unpredictable for planning purposes. Secondly, flat tier pricing now allows us to expand to third party development platforms which commonly support a tiered, flat pricing model. Lastly, in the coming months, we’ll be launching a number of products and services that aren’t call-based, so it would over-complicate our pricing to have to support both per-sip pricing on the products that supported it, and monthly pricing on the products that don’t.

This change will go into effect towards the end of the month. We’ll be posting more specifically about this soon, but the overview of this is that we’ll be launching with three monthly plans priced at $9, $49, and $79 per month. Each plan will have an escalating allowance of total API calls, records stored, and API rate limits respective to their tier across all products. We’re currently working out the details on these respective API limits and will release this information in coming weeks.

Each of these plans will come with a 60-day free trial, so developers will have free service to kick the tires on the plan of their choosing. Furthermore, current SimpleGeo developers who have a provided payment information will get an additional 30 days added to their free trial for a total of 90 days of free service.

On the topic of third party platforms, two examples that you’ll see shortly are Heroku and Appcelerator. We’re very excited about the news of working with these two amazing companies as distribution/integration partners, so we’ll post the details of these partnerships separately from this.

Lastly, we’re very excited to announce that the SimpleGeo’s CC0 Places data set is now available for download at no cost. If you’d like to get your hands on 21M+ POIs that cover 63 countries, we’re ready to hand that over to you in one file. The file is about 2GB in .ZIP format, and remember, with the CC0 license, this data becomes yours – free and clear – to do whatever you want. We hope you do awesome things with it! You can download it now by clicking here.

This dataset will also be integrated into the larger Factual dataset which will be offered later through our API.

• Pricing changes later this month to a flat, tiered pricing model
• 3rd party distribution and integration including Appcelerator and Heroku
• Release of SimpleGeo’s CC0 Places dataset as a download

If you have any questions about any of the above, please feel free to reach out to us in our Developer Help Group. As always – thank you for being a part of the SimpleGeo development community!

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