Venture firm First Round Capital has led the Series A funding round for start-up SimpleGeo, a buzzed-about new company that has built a product for easy integration of "location" features into Web and mobile apps, according to multiple sources familiar with the deal.
Also contributing to the round, sources say, are Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and many of the usual suspects from Silicon Valley's merry band of angel investors: among them are Ron Conway, Digg founder Kevin Rose, ex-Googler Chris Sacca, ubiquitous personality Gary Vaynerchuk, and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. One detail we weren't able to nail down was exactly how much money was raised, but one source says it's a "small" amount, probably in the low seven figures.
SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan declined to comment, but when we spoke to him earlier this month about SimpleGeo's official launch, he had said that the company was working on closing a round.
Some background on SimpleGeo: The company, based in Boulder, Colo., and co-founded by Galligan and former Digg engineer Joe Stump, originally planned to make location-aware augmented reality games. When they found out how difficult it was to make each game from scratch, they refocused the company on making a set of location-aware features for clients. They sell that in three versions ranging from free to $2,499/month.
Meanwhile, the location-aware market continues to heat up, with game-like services Foursquare and Gowalla poking into the mainstream, as well as the first appearance of Twitter's geolocation feature in the latest version of iPhone client Tweetie. Once Twitter members turn that on, their messages can be tagged with the exact location from which they were broadcast.
UPDATE (10:52 a.m. PT): The company has confirmed the round of funding via Twitter, and added the detail that it's a total of $1.5 million.
Location awareness is hot, from gamelike social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla to platforms such as Google Latitude. Now one start-up is hoping to make it as easy for any company to integrate into a Web or mobile service as it is for retailers to use PayPal. Meet SimpleGeo, which on Thursday is launching into a private beta.
Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo, co-founded by former Digg engineer Joe Stump and Socialthing founder Matt Galligan (who sold the would-be FriendFeed competitor to AOL), started out as a company called Crash Corp. earlier this year. The goal was to make augmented-reality applications for mobile devices like the iPhone, but the founders said that building the location-aware infrastructure for their first game took a whopping three months.
So they changed their company name and angle: SimpleGeo's purpose is to build that infrastructure for other companies to eliminate the development hell, hoping to do for "geo" apps what PayPal did for sites requiring payment systems or Facebook did for sites requiring logins and social-networking features. The complete offering, which can also build in augmented-reality features, encompasses storage, analytics, and a software development kit (SDK).
Three versions are available: free, $399 per month, and $2,499 per month. A public version is slated to launch in the spring.
Nobody's really doing this yet, though apparently a few other start-ups are toying with similar business plans, and SimpleGeo is still new enough that it has not yet closed a round of venture funding. Because it's in private beta, we also haven't yet seen just how powerful it is (though Galligan has posted some test video to Flickr) so it's not yet possible to answer the big, glaring question: what if Google makes a big, developer-focused Latitude push that could snuff out smaller competition?
Privacy--who needs it? The creators of WeFi don't seem to think much of it, although that might not be a bad thing
Today the company, which offers up a pretty svelte little replacement for Windows' clunky Wi-Fi manager, is launching two new items: a mobile application for Windows Mobile users (which could soon be SideKick users too), along with a Facebook application to help users track people using the service. Oddly enough, in all its news release bravado the company failed to offer up a link to said Facebook application, and it's not in the directory--so I can't get my hands on it.
The Windows Mobile application is similar to the desktop version--letting users discover and log Wi-Fi spots, as well as add them to a central database which can searched and referenced. Think of it a little bit like Wi-fi Hotspotr (review), but integrated at a system level.
What's interesting here is the new Facebook application, which like Whereboutz (review), will let users track Facebook friends if they're using WeFi. This all happens in real-time, meaning if a friend is at the local coffee shop and they decide to check their e-mail using a Windows Mobile smart phone, WeFi users will see them pop up on a map. Users can even get these status alerts to show up in the Facebook news feed.
WeFi has had a similar program going through Twitter, letting members automatically note where they are grabbing Wifi via a WeFi-marked access point. To some this might be a little more information than they're comfortable sharing. I'm hoping that WeFi has setup the application to limit who can see the information using Facebook's default privacy settings, or at least let users pick out who gets to see what off a short list.
I'll update with links to the Facebook application when the WeFi folks get back to me. In the meantime check out the service in action here.
Related: Two ways to geolocate your dog
Check out local Wi-Fi hot spots or add your own. Wefi's desktop, mobile, and Facebook application let you find hot spots, and show others where you are in real-time.
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