SimpleGeo Launch Today!

It's no secret that location-based services are hot commodities, but one startup in particular has caught my attention, SimpleGeo.    The service is coming out of Beta tomorrow, and its launch process has just been fascinating to follow.  

What :  SimpleGeo is a location information platform that other businesses can build on top of.  Whether your business needs information on a specific area, or person, they can provide the platform through which to gain access to all of that information.  In essence, they enable you to outsource and cut down on the costs associated with building and integrating location into your platform.

Strategy: They began by targeting the developer community - and they have bout 5,000 partners lined up already!  The strategy seems to have really paid off - they're coming out of beta with a fantastic network of existing users, and probably an amazing amount of feedback as to what is needed by developers, and how to streamline their platform for integration.  

Although the foursquares and gowallas of the world will continue to be interesting, as they're the client facing services (...even though services like Meetro were truly the first onto the scene...), SimpleGeo is unique in that it's a B2B service.

Their pricing also seems to hit the nail on the head - they're letting developers pick and choose what they'll be using, and pay for the services accordingly.  Thus far it seems that it's free for up to a million calls (wow), and then 399 for 2 mm calls, 2499 for 10mm calls, and $9,999 for 30 mm calls.   What's convincing here is that it will probably hook a large amount of startups looking to keep their development costs down, and then scale with them as they grow. 


You can check them out here.