Former Digg CEO Jay Adelson has joined location-based data startup SimpleGeo as CEO. He will also join the company's board of directors.
SimpleGeo, which has increased its staff from four to 25 since January and raised $8.14 million in a Series A in May, offers a suite of sophisticated geo-data products for purchase. The service targets individual developers and businesses who want to immediately build or enhance location-based applications in minutes.
Among its employees are former Digg staffers Joe Stump (previously lead architect of Digg), designer Jeffrey Kalmikoff, engineers Ian Eure and Paul Lathrop, and product ambassador Nicole Williams.
SimpleGeo's current CEO, Matt Galligan, will serve as the startup's Chief Strategy Officer moving forward, he announced in a blog post.
Adelson resigned from Digg in April, shortly before the company released what's proved to be a hugely unpopular site overhaul. Traffic has plummeted heavily since then. At a conference in September, founder Kevin Rose said he was "burned out" and refused to confirm that he would still be working at the company by the end of 2010. In mid-October, Digg named a new CEO; later that month, he announced that the startup would be cutting its staff from 67 to 42 — more than one-third of the total team — in an effort to become profitable again. Among the casualties was Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards.