We’re gearing up to launch our new tiered pricing model on September 1, so we wanted to give you a peek into what those tiers will look like. We’ve broken the pricing into three tiers: Basic, Plus, and Premium. Below are the details on each tier, and please note that there is a 60-day free trial on all plans.

• 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.

Thanks to the tireless work of our own Melissa Santos, SimpleGeo Context is now home to international neighborhood listings in a dozen new cities, from Canada to the Indian subcontinent!

• 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!

A large part of our job at SimpleGeo consists of listening closely to our users, and trying to understand what kinds of geo-related tools will make their lives easier and their apps more awesome. One thing we hear about pretty regularly is the lack of freely available neighborhood boundaries for international cities.

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!

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