Simply irresistible, SimpleGeo!

31/03/10 posted by Annie

If you like the look of location-based marketing, tomorrow's launch of SimpleGeo might be one to watch. Their beta version which came out late last year, is already used by roughly 5,000 developers. Tomorrow, the SimpleGeo platform will be open to public use with two new products. The first product will be a Marketplace, for companies and developers looking to cash in on the lo-so trend and easily pick which geo-data they want to use, and from which providers. Think familiar friends like Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. CEO Matt Galligan is likening the SimpleGeo Marketplace to "iTunes for geo-data". The service will sell geo-data from their six launch partners, who will share the profits on a 70/30 split.

The second new product is the SimpleGeo Storage Engine, which will allow developers to store locations and do queries on them. SimpleGeo has already lined up many features, such as SpotRank, which uses real-time location data from GPS-aware smartphones to map out trends for "Spots". It figures out time and place differences to work out trending ranks for locales all over the world. SpotRank is the product of SimpleGeo's partnership with Skyhook Wireless. Another new feature called “Polygon” will let developers send in the name of an area such as “The Mission” in San Francisco, and SimpleGeo will return a list of everything in that area. Down the road, SimpleGeo also plans to add in-depth visualisation and analytics tools to their offerings.

So in a nutshell, SimpleGeo promises to simplify and consolidate the whole task of getting into the lo-so landscape, bringing everything tantalisingly before your fingertips. The service targets individual developers and businesses who want to immediately build or enhance location-based applications in minutes. Branding themselves as "simply the easiest way to use location," SimpleGeo sounds like an incredible innovation which will certainly see more unique ways to incorporate lo-so marketing. SimpleGeo has recently signed some impressive partnerships with DeCarta, ESRI, Localeze, MetaCarta, Quova, Stamen Design, and Weather Decision Technologies. Some services, like Stickybits for barcode geo-tagging, and Vicarious.ly for real-time location-based streams are already using SimpleGeo services and showing off how amazing it is.

But what will it cost for businesses wanting in? There's a free honeymoon period, but after this users will need to pay per user or per month, meaning potentially very high fees for high volume companies. The pricing model is based on how much an engineer would be paid to handle the amounts of data. As SimpleGeo curates the data, as well as provides the servers for it, its advantages are sure to outweigh the costs for most businesses.