Yesterday it was announced that Boulder-based SimpleGeo has received $1.5 million in a seed funding round, led by a large group of high profile angel investors. The company, founded by startup veterans Matt Galligan and Joe Stump, provides mobile application developers with access to real time location-based services (LBS). What this means for engineers who build apps is they can outsource the geolocating aspect of their project to SimpleGeo, potentially saving months of project man hours and allowing them to focus on the unique elements of their effort.
The seed round announced yesterday was lead by First Round Capital and included such technology luminaries as Kevin Rose, Shawn Fanning, and David Cohen.
Recently RockyRadar caught up with Galligan. We’ve included the full text of his answers as the former co-founder of SocialThing! is highly sought on the topic of integrating LBS into the data stream:
Q: Real-time apps appear to be a market differentiator for SimpleGeo. Could you provide some potential examples of future apps where real-time is added to LBS in order to create a substantial value add?
A: Real-time is inherently important to location aware apps to begin with. Imagine the thousands of people that are constantly updating their location…that is real-time. Up until now, location has lived in a static world with static events, and only searches against data that may be even a year old. Now, everything has to be real time. Things are happening faster, people are checking in, and there’s a constant pressure to do it real-time. Our infrastructure was designed to handle those kinds of requests…so we hope that real-time becomes more relevant to location as a result.
Q: What is the value proposition of the firm in real terms, as in what might a developer save in dollars (or hours) by adopting the SimpleGeo APIs on the front end instead of beginning from scratch?
A: It took us three months just to get a working alpha for the games that we originally set out to develop. We by no means had bad engineers; it’s just that building location infrastructure is NOT insignificant. It’s a similar thing to if you were to build a website that sold stuff, you wouldn’t build your own credit card interface, you’d use PayPal. And if you built a socially-aware app, you wouldn’t build your own social graph, you’d use Facebook. In terms of hard numbers, it’s always a different scenario, but generally speaking, we’ll at least save the need for one dedicated engineer on this. Most location-based companies have well more than just one developer dedicated to this.
Q. Strategically speaking, is SimpleGeo on a trajectory to go deeper into LBS or will the company move into other services?
We’ll continue to build out additional location functionality…moving into shapefiles, polygons, neighborhood data, etc. We won’t move out of location.
