Jay Adelson, known to some as the recent CEO of Digg but known to others for far more, has taken a position as the new CEO of pre-launched and eagerly-awaited geolocation data platform SimpleGeo, the company announced today.
SimpleGeo says it will launch “this Fall” and its goal will be “to build and index all kinds of public and private geospatial data and make access as easy as possible.” We reported all the way back in February that the company was indexing more than 1 million locations per hour. That’s a whole lot of data describing various places that other applications can tap into. Adelson, the company’s new leader, is just 40 years old but has founded some of the most important, if little-known, tech companies in the last 15 years.
SimpleGeo founding CEO Matt Galligan, who will become the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, put Adelson’s background in context thusly:
“Jay founded Equinix, a billion dollar international company that operates data centers and provides network connectivity services for companies around the world. Currently, well over 70% of the world’s Internet traffic depends on Equinix to reach its destination. He also co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation’s Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), one of the largest Internet aggregation points in the United States. Before that, Jay was a founding employee of Netcom, one of the nation’s first ISPs.”
Galligan, who sold a social stream aggregator called SocialThing to AOL in 2008, co-founded SimpleGeo with former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump. The two originally called the endeavor CrashCorp and began building an augmented reality mobile gaming company.
ReadWriteWeb’s Chris Cameron explained the duo’s radical pivot in a profile this spring:
“Their original plan was create mobile games using augmented reality, but they soon learned that the hardest part was developing the back-end geolocation infrastructure that would support their applications.
The company that plays the most central role in providing geodata to the fast-growing world of Web and mobile apps and startups will be the provider of the lens through which users (and developers) see a whole new dimension of computing, if not lived experience of the world around us…
If you’ll indulge me in a little Allegory of the Cave talk: the geodata these companies are compiling describes qualities of physical places that we haven’t previously been able to see, on-site or remotely. They make demographics and social trends, commerce and politics, culture and history visible, tied to specific places and accessible through the mobile devices we carry in our pockets. It was at this point that Galligan and Stump saw an opportunity, quickly changed directions and created SimpleGeo. Instead of jumping in the with the masses of application developers using augmented reality to wow smartphone users, the pair instead focused on serving the needs of the developers themselves, creating a ‘geodata in a box’ service.”
Seizing Opportunity: How CrashCorp Became SimpleGeo
The company has now raised nearly $10 million in venture capital. It has received an incredible amount of attention in the startup-focused press, thanks largely to the backgrounds and dynamic personalities of its founders – but also because of the scope of its ambition and the exciting potential represented by its goals.
“To say that this has been a blistering fast ride would be a massive understatement,” Galligan said in a blog post about his decision to give up his CEO position. “The pace of innovation in the geolocation industry as a whole, as well as at our company, has been at break-neck speed since the beginning of 2010. We’ve gone from four to 23 employees in nine months, built technology that, at the end of last year we were only dreaming of, and have thousands of developers using our platform.”
Geo is So Hot it Hurts
Putting a heavy hitter like Adelson in charge will help bolster the ambitious company’s chances in a battle against a whole lot of competition and pseudo-competition, including entrenched enterprise geodata megaliths, slow-baked open source standards-based technologies, other hiplittlestartups, hip startups that aren’t so little, Google (Google’s Marissa Mayer, who was the VP of search product, is now focused entirely on local and location) and free open-source geodata backed by big mapping companies trying to make sure Google doesn’t eat their lunch.
This market is so big that there are major players in it who haven’t even heard of SimpleGeo, despite all the hype the company has received in the press.
In other words, it’s a very crowded market.
The company that plays the most central role in providing geodata to the fast-growing world of Web and mobile apps and startups will be the provider of the lens through which users (and developers) see a whole new dimension of computing, if not lived experience of the world around us.
If you’ll indulge me in a little Allegory of the Cave talk: the geodata these companies are compiling describes qualities of physical places that we haven’t previously been able to see, on-site or remotely. They make demographics and social trends, commerce and politics, culture and history visible, tied to specific places and accessible through the mobile devices we carry in our pockets.
First computing became democratized, then it became social, and now it is leaving the desktop and changing the way many of us experience the places formerly known as the offline world. All of those transformations have produced tidal waves of new data, upon which new companies, user experiences and types of economy have been produced.
Will Facebook be the Facebook of Location (as it has become to identity), will a shared and open standard data format rule the day, or will a startup like SimpleGeo succeed in putting itself in the center of the coming geo-aware world?
That question becomes a little more interesting with Adelson at the helm.
