Tuesday 29 March 2011

SimpleGeo Releases Database for Location-Based App Makers

The new database offering is fine tuned to fit the real-time needs of developers who use location in their applications. The on-demand database, with pricing determined by usage, will be available for web, Android, iOS and Windows Mobile 7 platforms.
“What we’ve come up with is one of the most powerful technologies in location,” says SimpleGeo co-founder and chief strategy officer Matt Galligan.
Developers can use the Storage product to store real-world data, and access the database from any mobile device or server via an HTTP API. Users can run queries on nearest neighbor, bounding box (developer-defined geographical regions) and radial location. SimpleGeo Storage, like the rest of the startup’s API, also supports latitude/longitude, IP address or physical street address queries.
Speed is said to be one of the greatest attributes of the cloud database. “In testing, 99% of all requests came in in less than 100 milliseconds,” says Galligan. The technology is also designed to help developers mitigate potential risks around location queries that would otherwise cause application downtime.
What does this news mean for the average app user? More sophisticated and location-rich applications. A yet-to-be named “major record label” is one of SimpleGeo’s early Storage customers. The label is using the database to record transactions and analyze the trends around how, where and why people buy music, says Galligan. Posterous is also using SimpleGeo Storage for its Events product, so Posterous users can see and post to nearby events in the iPhone app.
SimpleGeo is introducing a new pricing structure around the database release. It will cost 25 cents per 1,000 API calls and 10 cents per 1,000 database records.

No comments:

Post a Comment