---- update 12/2/09---

Update 2: Rocky Radar has an interview with Galligan (who commented below).

--- update 11/30/09 ----

Update: C|net confirms a small first round of funding has been closed including investment from folks like Ron Conway, Digg founder Kevin Rose, ex-Googler Chris Sacca, ubiquitous personality Gary Vaynerchuk, and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter.

While there may be buzz in general tech land on this startup, there's not a lot of buzzing in geoland!

- C|net

--- original post 11/20/09 -----

Former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan are now offering a private beta of SimpleGeo, a "new infrastructure for location based services."

Per TechCrunch:

SimpleGeo is akin to an ‘Amazon Web Services’ for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them.

This description from an earlier TechCrunch post is more clear:

SimpleGeo is ready-to-use location infrastructure. They currently have three products: a geo-spatial Context Engine, Storage Engine and a comprehensive SDK. The SimpleGeo Context Engine enables application developers to quickly and easily get relevant information about specific locales including (but not limited to) ZIP codes, real-time weather, and geo-tagged media. Additionally, the SimpleGeo Storage Engine makes it possible to store and query location data in a scalable fashion, as well as perform complicated geospatial operations effortlessly.

I'm thinking the back end may be an open source stack...