SimpleGeo is a neat service that just came out of private beta. Essentially they are attacking the problem that many new start-ups are having in the location based services space. That is managing massive amounts of geotagged data and the complex queries that go along with those services. I see this as the beginning of Cloud 2.0 (did I just coin a phrase), where Cloud 1.0 are the horizontal hosting services and horizontal data services such as S3, EC2, App Engine, Google Maps, etc. Where cloud 2.0 services are solving specific problems as a web service and doing so in and end to end manner and at the scale you need with a pay per use business model. I think we will see a lot more of these going forward.

What I like about SimpleGeo is, they are attacking a problem that many companies will face as location gets tied into more and more services. Location applications can require millions and millions of records and complex queries to get what you need from those records. With the SimpleGeo API you simple throw geocoded data over to them and store it in layers (which are buckets of data in their vernacular). You can then use the API to query the data in a number of ways all through a simple REST API. The service is free for layer applications up to 1 million queries per month so the small guys can get started free of charge. It then starts to get pricey but only have you hit over a million requests in a month so by that time you should have some momentum and hopefully revenue to cover the costs. I think these guys are worth keeping an eye on. Love the concept and the timing.