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.

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!

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!

The SimpleGeo Places team has been hard at work building SimpleGeo Places 1.2. Places 1.2 boasts 26.9M places from over 40 countries across the world. We are pumped to populate the next generation of SimpleGeo Places with Factual‘s excellent place data.

Places 1.2 is in production right now and ready for you to start developing on. It’s simple to try out, as our new pricing plan gives you 30k calls for just $9 per month, starting with a 60 day free trial.

Higher-quality underlying data with greater worldwide coverage

Factual is solely focused on providing the highest quality place data available. Their machine learning and data experts are constantly merging in new data sources to provide more complete, accurate results, while also eliminating duplicates.

New infrastructure provides more fine-grained filtering. Query more effectively by keyword or by multiple categories.

Allows you to specify keywords, multiple category filters, radius restrictions, and results limits. Keyword searches include the name, phone number, categories, address, city, state, and country fields.

Bounding box queries give you more precision

Similar to places search by lat/lon, except requires you to pass a bounding box; handy for populating a rectangular map.

Full-text search of places without specifying a geo component.

Allows you to specify keywords, multiple category filters, and results limits, but searches non-spatially. Keyword searches include the name, phone number, categories, address, city, state, and country fields.

Slightly altered place format

Because of the underlying data changes, Places 1.2 has a slightly altered structure for a place. The differences are detailed at the SimpleGeo Places documentation.

Backwards compatibility with SimpleGeo Places 1.0 for an easy upgrade

We’ll return a Factual place if you query with a Factual place ID, or return a 301 or 302 response to the correct location for that record if it’s a Places 1.0 SimpleGeo handle.

Client support

The Python, iOS, Android/Java, and JavaScript clients fully support Places 1.2.

To help you explore the data and its improved quality for yourself, we’ve updated the SimpleGeo Places demo to use Places 1.2. Factual provides extremely liberal licensing, which allows you do pretty much anything a developer would want to do as long as you keep the ID attached to the data, push edits back to Factual (we’ll provide an easy way to push edits back soon), and don’t sell the data in bulk.

SimpleGeo Places 1.2 demo

SimpleGeo Places 1.2 documentation

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in our Google Group or email simplegeo@googlegroups.com.

Week we’re extremely excited to announce a partnership with Heroku with the launch of a SimpleGeo premium add-on this week. Heroku is an amazing company that offers Ruby as a Platform to an immense community of developers around the world. The SimpleGeo premium add-on that we developed will give developers using Heroku an easy way to integrate SimpleGeo’s services, which include our Context, Places, and Storage products.

Also, if you’re in the Bay Area this week, you can look for SimpleGeo at Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference this week. Our Director of Development, Ben Standefer, will be on hand to do demos of the add-on and to provide advice on how to leverage SimpleGeo services in your applications.

• 30,000 monthly API calls across all services
• 50,000 total records stored
• 5 calls per second

• 200,000 monthly API calls across all services
• 300,000 total records stored
• 20 calls per second

• 500,000 monthly API calls across all services
• 1,000,000 total records stored
• 40 calls per second

As with any tiered plan that has limits on calls or records stored, there are per-sip fees associated with “going over” your plans limits. All costs associated with the additional calls or records stored are fully explained on the new pricing page which will launch on Thursday.

To reiterate from the previous announcement about pricing, any user who currently has a SimpleGeo account with a saved payment profile, will get an additional 30 days of free trial added to their plan, giving them a total of 90 days of free service at whichever plan they choose.

We’re incredibly excited to be rolling out this new pricing plan, as it enables us to launch a number of new infrastructure services over the coming months, along with our ability to integrate our service offerings with 3rd-party development platforms such as Heroku and Appcelerator.

As always, if there’s any questions about this or anything else related to SimpleGeo products or services, you can visit our Developer Portal to find links for help, documentation, or our Google Help Group.

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.

• Bangkok
• Budapest
• Cairo
• Copenhagen
• Geneva
• Madrid
• Montreal
• Mumbai
• Prague
• Tel Aviv
• Toronto
• Vancouver

This means SimpleGeo Context will now tell you in which part of town you can find, say, the CN Tower or the Dadar railway station. (Scroll down to see the map!)

You can see visualizations of the automatically generated neighborhood boundaries in our Flickr gallery, and you can read more about how we construct our international neighborhood dataset in SimpleGeo Context in our original blog post. You can also download the latest data dump.

We’ll be adding more neighborhood data in the very near future, so stay tuned!

The best way to improve our clients is to put on the developer hat and start coding! That’s exactly why we created SimpleGeo’s iOS app, now freely available on the App Store as a universal binary.

Our app demonstrates the basic functions of SimpleGeo Context, Places, and Storage:

Context: Find contextual information about a location using SimpleGeo Context. View polygons representing neighborhoods, urban areas, and other regions on a map. Search for addresses using our geocoder.

Places: Browse local businesses using SimpleGeo Places. Search for different types of businesses using Places’ search functionality.

Storage: Explore geospacial records using SimpleGeo Storage. See geotagged Wikipedia articles, Geonames POIs, and Flickr photos on a map. Log into your SimpleGeo account to browse your own custom layers (it’s especially cool with an iPad!).

Our app is pure SimpleGeo. It harnesses the newly released SimpleGeo.framework 2.0 to make all network requests. Anything you see in the app can be done with a free copy of Xcode, SimpleGeo.framework, and a SimpleGeo account.

Download the app today, then start coding your own!

Now, SimpleGeo Context has had neighborhood boundaries for most major US cities ever since we launched the product. We’ve been asked about neighborhoods in cities outside the US, but, when we started looking, we didn’t immediately find a source that was available under a license that we could encourage you to freely reuse. So we decided to make our own!

We’re pleased to announce the availability in SimpleGeo Context of neighborhood boundaries for the following twelve cities:

• Amsterdam
• Barcelona
• Beijing
• Berlin
• Florence
• London
• Paris
• Rome
• Shanghai
• Sydney
• Tokyo
• Vienna

Additionally, we now have approximate boundaries for Paris’s arrondissements and Berlin’s ortsteils. Check out the Eiffel Tower in our Context demo – scroll down to see the map, and click “Features” on the right – or perhaps Westminster Abbey. You can also see some visualizations in our Flickr stream.

Now, neighborhoods are, in many ways, a unique form of geography. Some geographies are physical by nature: A park has boundaries, a road has a center line, et cetera. Most non-physical geographies have some legal existence, like a post code or a city or a province, where a statute or a treaty defines the boundaries of the geography. As an informal division of a city, a neighborhood’s boundaries are often both invisible and lacking in precise definition. Often, the conventionally accepted boundaries of a neighborhood ebb and flow over time, as the economics or demographics of the region change. Neighborhood boundaries are usually fuzzy, and frequently overlap in practice, in ways that other kinds of geography do not.

So, we’ll be totally candid – our new international neighborhood dataset is definitely a work in progress. There are some evident issues with the new dataset, but we thought it better to release and then iterate, rather than wait indefinitely on impossible perfection. We hope to continue to refine and improve the data, as well as add lots of new cities.

Due to the data sources we combined to produce them, all of the new neighborhood data in Context is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). You can find the new neighborhoods in SimpleGeo Context, and you can also download the whole data set. We hope you do awesome things with it!

Read on for the technical details!

Generating neighborhood boundaries for new cities actually turned out to be a pretty good trick. We didn’t have any source for boundaries themselves, but Flickr’s body of geotagged photos represent a pool of samples of neighborhood locations, because photos taken in cities often have a machine tag containing the Where On Earth ID (or “WoE ID”) for the corresponding neighborhood. We used the freely available Yahoo! GeoPlanet data dumps to identify the WoE IDs of neighborhoods — “Suburb” or “LocalAdmin” in the parlance of GeoPlanet — in the cities in which we were interested. We then used the Flickr API to draw a sample of geotagged photo locations for that WoE ID to establish a kind of “cloud” of points that roughly represent that neighborhood.

At first, we tried generating a Voronoi diagram over the entire area of the city, and then merging the resulting shapes by WoE ID. This yielded “boundaries” that were very organic, and kind of weird looking. They didn’t correspond to our intuitions about how neighborhoods are structured in the minds of residents and visitors. In our experience, neighborhood boundaries in large cities often conform to the physical geography, such as the lines of roads and waterways, rather than cutting across city blocks, and even buildings.

We turned to OpenStreetMap as a source for the physical geography of roads, railroads, and waterways, because OSM turns out to be a pretty good source for this sort of data in most of the world’s largest cities. After loading the entire world of OSM into a PostGIS database, we take the linework for each city, and, treating it as a set of polygon boundaries, use GRASS to clean up the data and generate a polygon for each “city block” in our area of interest. Using OSM, of course, means that the results need to be licensed ODbL, in order to respect the desire of the community that derivative works be shared alike.

The rest of the work gets done in Python, using the excellent Shapely library. First, we group the geotagged photo locations by neighborhood, and then filter them by median absolute deviation to remove mistagged outliers. Next, we iterate over each city block, and tally up the weighted inverse distances of the n nearest geotagged photos to decide which neighborhood the block “belongs” to. After all the blocks are assigned, we extract the largest polygon for each neighborhood as its “core”, reassign blocks that are detached from their core to other nearby neighborhoods, and do a bit of cleanup. This surprisingly simple local-then-global approach yields pretty convincing results.

We’ve considered two possible improvements for the future. We’ve experimented with an additional step that focuses on swapping blocks at the edges of neighborhoods to improve “compactness”, which intuitively feels like a important property of neighborhood boundaries, and we hope to revisit this soon.

The other possible “improvement” has to do with the fact that, for the time being, the boundaries we’re providing are sharply defined. We felt that this might be easier for developers to work with, versus a set of neighborhood boundaries with variable overlap, but we’d really like your feedback about this works out for you in practice.

You can find the code on Github, if you’re interested: http://github.com/simplegeo/betashapes/. The name of the code repository is left as an exercise for the reader.