At long last (as I've been waiting to say this for a few weeks now), I'd like to announce that in two weeks, I'll be joining SimpleGeo as one of their software engineers!

SimpleGeo, for those of you who've been living under a rock for the last couple of months (or alternately, those of you who don't work in tech) is a new startup, just past its initial launch, that's going to make the incredibly difficult (not to mention time-consuming and computationally intensive) task of creating and managing a store of location-based data easy, and managed by people who actually like that sort of thing. This means that the huge amount of data coming from every mobile phone periodically (like every 5 minutes) on every user's whereabouts can actually be harnessed and made useful to people who don't want to spend time on advanced polygonal search algorithms. (This is good.)

To me, SimpleGeo allows me a chance to further my ongoing interests in digital privacy, because this is precisely the sort of thing that phone companies already do to you (yes, that's about Yahoo, but phone companies are actually obligated by law to do the same thing)-- but which we, the nerdly few, haven't been able to harness. Now we can-- and it's not just possible, it's easy.

I got to meet the entire team a few weeks ago, when I was in Boulder, and I was incredibly impressed with both their breadth of experience, and their passion to make the project work, when it is quite truthfully something that's never done before; all of us will be creating new code that does new things, which is a pretty great opportunity. (In addition, of course, there will be a few side benefits, such as not horrifying the entire NPR staff at once when I mention my job description. It's the little things.)

So next week, I'll be moving to beautiful Boulder, CO, and starting very soon after that. I'll still be near a big airport (Boulder's just as close to Denver as Denver Airport is, actually, and closer than some Denver suburbs), so there's no reason people can't visit me, either; while it's the size of my hometown, Boulder has the advantages of being right next to a huge city, which is great.

Onward, then-- and upward indeed!