Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know of any sites using SimpleGeo for their location infrastructure?

We use it at reddit/redditgifts. Really bummed.

I'd been considering using it through Heroku to be able to find nearby bus/train stops in a public transit mobile web app. I see that SpacialDB is in private beta as a Heroku addon (http://addons.heroku.com/spacialdb) - does anyone have SpacialDB experience? I'm looking to find nearby points out of a database of ~5000 locations, namely all the public transit stops in the Boston area.

Hi Andrew, would love to have you to try out SpacialDB, just send me an email at info~at~spacialdb~dot~com and I'd be very happy to send you a beta invite.

With SpacialDB, we wanted the best of both worlds, traditional GIS and Web, RT & Mobile-Centric APIs.

The way we did this was to let users provision databases, then import any geodata (points,lines,polygons 2 or 3D) into SpacialDB and either use a raw PostgreSQL connection (from a pool) or our REST API (http://devcenter.spacialdb.com/Layers-API-v1-Documentation.h...) to query it - its super useful for building geo-apps quickly.

In fact, initially that's why we built it; we need a quick way to get going for a lot of the disaster response work we do at nomad-labs (geospatial.nomad-labs.com)

We were using it in a yet to be released iPhone app as part of a venue locator. Specifically, we had various Storage layers with venues and other points of interest. Our client would have been able to add and remove POIs easily without updating the iOS app, layers could be turned off and on, etc. Now we must use local static data, we're just a couple of weeks away from release and can't really afford to switch our location backend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com