#simplegeo

Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers.

Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

Location is an important element of everyday life. Whether we are traveling between cities, meeting friends at a nearby cafe, or reading the local news, location is an inseparable component for understanding how we live. Web services and mobile applications benefit from knowing a user’s location and surrounding context like proximity to places of interest, real time weather and local neighborhood characteristics. Much like how Facebook Connect offers applications turnkey social integration, SimpleGeo enables any application to take advantage of location context. The recent success of check-in applications and local shopping sites highlight the popularity and capability of location awareness.

SimpleGeo provides developers an easy way to store, manage and query location data. They offer three products that make it simpler to build a location aware application: Storage, Context and Places. Similar to Amazon S3, Storage provides cloud computing database infrastructure for developers to dynamically scale their storage and access needs without adding their own capacity or bandwidth. Context provides an application programming interface (API) for interpreting latitude and longitude into neighborhood, real time weather, geotagged photos and other location related information. Given increasing smartphone adoption, developers can more often expect their users’ location to be available by GPS or WiFi triangulation (with user opt-in permission). The Places API returns nearby businesses and other points of interest. This is a powerful abstraction for a developer since he or she (1) only needs to query one API for multiple location layers, (2) does not have to write code to handle location algorithms like proximity by radius or within a polygon and (3) can scale their location storage needs dynamically. A mobile operating system can retrieve current location but SimpleGeo provides context. Data owners can offer location layers through the SimpleGeo Data Library for free or paid access. Application developers can focus on building their core features and user interaction while taking advantage of location context with little effort or algorithm expertise. These APIs are designed to abstract away the difficult location storage and access problems and provide developers with a straightforward interface and code base.

Location awareness makes applications and web services more relevant to consumers. There are many use cases but a few notable examples include check-in and local shopping applications. Check-in applications help users discover nearby places and tips from their friends. SimpleGeo can provide the infrastructure for storing the check-in activity and retrieving nearby tips. SimpleGeo can perform queries like returning location data within a certain radius or current neighborhood. Shopping services like Groupon’s local social buying or Milo’s in-store price comparison engine rely on location tagged deals and local inventory availability. All services that can make a HTTP request can take advantage of these APIs. Ubiquitous access to location context enables smarter applications. This improves the user experience by powering applications to understand a user’s physical surroundings and better react to their current environment.

The SimpleGeo product consists of SDKs and supporting tutorials, documentation, website and engineering blog. They offer code for Python, PHP, Ruby, Objective C and Java, which covers the major mobile and web development languages. Their website is inviting, clean and supported with gorgeous icons and art. As a backend service, it’s important that developers enjoy working with the APIs. The documentation is clearly written and presented using their custom built documentation template. Their blog has a friendly tone of voice and they communicate directly with developers on Twitter, in chatrooms, and at conferences. They offer free access to the Places and Context APIs and then charge by storage needs. These efforts improve developer relations and also educate the mobile industry to the potential of location aware applications.

Companies like Google, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter have valuable sources of location data and established developer relations. SimpleGeo benefits from data availability and participation from providers like SkyHook. If geolocation data becomes proprietary and closed from public consumption, SimpleGeo’s supply of location data may be limited. There are also open source solutions from OpenGeo and OpenStreetMap which threaten SimpleGeo's business. SimpleGeo will need to differentiate from free services by providing developers with straightforward access to many location layers and solving developers scaling needs. SimpleGeo could offer other location algorithms to be run over its datasets to differentiate from free services. For example, an application might want to know which nearby restaurant is easiest to walk to or within a certain number of minutes by public transportation. There are new client markets to explore such as helping ad networks improve location based targeting by supplying context like demographics, income distribution, and political affiliation by neighborhood. SimpleGeo can also expand into corporate and academic geographical information systems (GIS) to compete with firms like ESRI but at lower price points and easier integration with popular development environments.

Location is fundamental to continuing to move consumer technology from gadgetry to a natural extension of everyday life through applications, background services, in browser customization, and much more. We’re just starting to see the creativity in location aware services and SimpleGeo is helping power this next generation of digital services.