FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Mapzen announced today its acquisition of Mission Integers, a San Francisco digital technology startup led by Michal Migurski. The company provides artisanally crafted 64-bit integers as a service. Migurski will join Mapzen as part of the deal.
Mapzen CEO Randy Meech said: “Earlier this year we acquired Brooklyn Integers, with Aaron Cope joining Mapzen in June. Who’s On First, our open gazetteer project, uses Brooklyn Integers to provide stable IDs for every location on earth. But because Brooklyn Integers mints only odd numbers, we soon realized an important part of the number space we’d overlooked. With this strategic acquisition Mapzen is doubling down on our artisanal integer strategy.”
“I am delighted to be an integral part of Mapzen,” commented Migurski. “They truly understand our overall mission and vision and will provide the resources to scale the service and realize its full potential to infinity, and beyond.” Mission Integers is currently said to be run on a Raspberry Pi in Migurski’s basement.
To put the deal in context, Etsy CTO John Allspaw commented from Brooklyn: “It’s not often that two systems of monotonously increasing sequences of numbers find each other in this crazy mixed-up world. Mission Integers and Brooklyn Integers truly complete each other.” Nelson Minar, San Francisco-based advisor to Mission Integers, showed an early grasp of the potential in a blog post several years ago: “…should the demand for artisanal foundries explode and the number boffins need to start paying for their fixed gear bicycles and ironic bottled beers; simply start charging for those last few valuable foundry IDs. Scarcity is the business model’s best friend.”
Mapzen, a mapping company that uses only open data and software for all its products, is making an exception in the case of its combined integer service. Meech explained, “We believe that unique, auto-incrementing integers are the only part of the geo stack likely to retain any proprietary value in the coming years. So we’ve decided to make an exception and keep both Brooklyn Integers and Mission Integers closed.”
Note: This post is (mostly) in jest. But this part is real.
