Ex-Digg CEO Jay Adelson to take the reins at location startup SimpleGeo

Jay Adelson, the former CEO of Digg, will take over as CEO of location startup SimpleGeo effective immediately.

If you’re not familiar with SimpleGeo, basically they offer developer tools, including APIs, that pack a ton of location data into a concise and easy-to-use format so that developers can build location into their apps.

SimpleGeo’s current CEO and co-founder Matt Galligan (read our interview with him earlier this year), will move to Chief Strategy Officer when Adelson joins. The startup’s other co-founder, Joe Stump, was previously the lead engineer at Digg, and worked for Adelson for a number of years.

Galligan, in a post just now, said that, A little over a month ago,

I approached our Board and discussed the idea of me moving into a new role that would allow me to focus on what I’m best at – company strategy, evangelism, and new concepts around the integration of location services. This idea would also mean bringing in an operationally-focused CEO whose expertise and experience can take SimpleGeo to the next level.

We’re assuming that Adelson will be based in San Francisco, as we believe he still lives there and SimpleGeo has an office there as well, though the founders are in Colorado.

So what does this mean for SimpleGeo? Well, first, it puts a CEO that oversaw significant growth at another venture backed company (Digg of course) and Adelson obviously is well known to not only Stump but the entire tech community as a whole, and as SimpleGeo is trying to reach out to a large developer base, having Adelson at the helm to communicate the message of the company while also helping it to scale, seems like a good step in the right direction for SimpleGeo.

Galligan also goes into a bit of Adelson’s history beyond Digg, which is impressive:

I’d like to explain a bit about why we chose him. Jay is a seasoned entrepreneur with experience in both the consumer and business-to-business sides of technology companies.

Many people are familiar with Jay from his role as CEO of Digg, where he helped transform a relatively unknown startup into a global brand, and also as founder (and current Chairman) of Revision3, a leading Internet television network. However, I feel like Jay’s time at Digg and Revision3 were really the outliers in his career.

Previous to both Digg and Revision3, Jay founded Equinix, a billion dollar international company that operates data centers and provides network connectivity services for companies around the world. Currently, well over 70% of the world’s Internet traffic depends on Equinix to reach its destination. He also co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation’s Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), one of the largest Internet aggregation points in the United States. Before that, Jay was a founding employee of Netcom, one of the nation’s first ISPs.

To say that Jay is the perfect guy for the job would be a massive understatement. We couldn’t be more excited for what SimpleGeo’s future holds with him as our CEO.

We’ll certainly be looking into seeing what comes out of this very intriguing announcement.

Note: TechCrunch first reported this story.