Edit: that repo seems to be very old. Quadtiles have been implemented successfully in a variety of languages, you should be able to find something more suitable.
Care to explain what you mean by "dead"? Just today v3.2 came out, and the company, the community, and their paid-for hosting service seem pretty alive to me.
Thanks for the kind words! The prototype was launched in 2013, you'd think the world would have caught up since :D. The platform underneath allows far more advanced functionality, so stick around, there will be many more usable (and useful) features in the near term.
If you are based in the UK, there is https://xploria.co.uk. Click/tap on any location on the map and you get a lot of information about the place, inclusive of generations, what percentage of families, singles, etc, schools within travel timw, and so on. Disclosure: I built this web app.
> May I ask what a non-technical founder should look for in a technical co-founder?
Breadth of expertise, ability to learn quickly, open minded when it comes to technology. Loves to work with clients and solve their problems more than they love the tech.
The B2B and PostGIS part caught my eye. I'm technical, but leading both the business and the technical sides of my spatial analytics company. I would be happy to share at least some of my technical knowledge. From infrastructure, DevOps, through database and data layer, and all the way to the frontend - I've been doing this for years and there could be a thing or two that may be useful to you.
On the other hand, I can always do better when it comes to B2B sales, so I am looking to learn too. Maybe we can have a chat sometimes.
This is gratuitous. You have a clear bias, granted, because it seems your domain is so specific, only a procedural language will do. But it seems you are unfamiliar with modern SQL tools. Some of the obvious ones that come to mind: Metabase[0] for visualisation or Apache MADlib[1] for in-database statistics and machine learning.
Which is absolutely fine in a non-critical scenario such as picking litter, or finding your mates at a festival. But, as the article demonstrates in detail, there are too many possibilities for error, which in a life or death scenario we cannot afford. Emergency services often deal with exactly that kind of scenario.
The guys at OpenCage Geocoder[0] are doing a great job using only open data. But they are a team with over a decade of experience parsing an deduplicating address data from dozens of countries.
That said, their jobs page doesn't have much for now, but you may want to keep an eye on it.
Disclaimer: the founder of the company and I are acquaintances, but my assessment is only based on the quality of their service. I've been using it in production for reverse geocoding for a few years now.
I agree that in general one would not use R to engineer software. However I disagree regarding low maintainability.
I've seen very complex R packages that have been around for 30+ years. They are actively maintained. Applying good design principles, unit testing, modularity - all that is very much doable in R.
And you will want to write software in R, especially if the purpose is to support the very activity of working with R packages and to expose the R statistical environment over HTTP. Case in point, the software I link to, in my comment above.
Not sure if 100% of their posts are mind blowing. It's hard to dispense much business wisdom via a Twitter feed. Still, you can learn a lot from them, especially if you follow the links they recommend. My favourite is at the top:
David S. Rose
@davidsrose
Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, angel investor
Jeff Bussgang
@bussgang
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital
Fred Wilson
@fredwilson
I am a VC
I'd also suggest to read through David Rose's replies on Quora. Very thoughtful
About six months ago I tested Kinvey (a BaaS) for an application that makes heavy use of data. Basically you upload your data (say, from CSV) and then you access it via API calls.
It looks like you can download your data at any time, say if you need to switch providers. I don't have any experience of other providers, but with Kinvey it doesn't look like there is a risk of vendor lock-in. It's data on the wire via AJAX requests. If things turn to be expensive when you grow up, you move the data to your own backend.
That said, I must add that I never ended up using them. The reason - I just needed something with serious geospatial capabilities. I mean PostgreSQL + PostGIS kind of thing.
There is also the DIY route, which is not necessarily the best, since it will prolong the time until you release a MVP. But, if you have the manpower to work on it, maybe Drupal is a good alternative for you. It can be set up as a backend, it is secure, and it's free. I think you can even set it up as a SPARQL endpoint.
Good luck with your startup! I don't wish you to reach millions of users, but instead to make millions of dollars :)
Looks like there is an implementation in Go [0]. I haven't tried the kind of geofencing you mention in memory, but I've had success with PostGIS.
[0] https://github.com/volkerp/goquadtree
Edit: that repo seems to be very old. Quadtiles have been implemented successfully in a variety of languages, you should be able to find something more suitable.