BOULDER - With the prevalence of smart phones and location-based social media services, Matt Galligan thinks he's in the perfect market.

Galligan and Joe Stump co-founded Boulder-based SimpleGeo Inc. to provide back-end location-based infrastructure for application developers.

By scooping up location-based data and storing it until needed, Galligan and Stump said they're getting a hold on a relatively untouched market. Currently, they said, there's no major competition.

Late last year, Twitter bought SimpleGeo's biggest competitor, Mixer Labs, to give Twitter geotagging capability. But because Twitter doesn't focus on geolocation data, Galligan doesn't consider it to be a competitor.

With SimpleGeo's database, which is stored at three fully redundant data centers, developers have access to a wide array of information that could add value to their app - especially in the world of smart phones.

Based on a phone's GPS coordinates and what the phone is pointed at, users potentially could find out what a specific building is, or power companies could access all their data about a targeted utility pole.

Other uses include pinging SimpleGeo's location database with the user's phone's GPS coordinates and receiving the address where the user is.

Stump and Galligan said they've thought about only a few of the seemingly endless uses for the location-based database. It's that growing market that provides optimism.

"We've seen a tremendous spike in mobile development overall, and so many of these devices have location capabilities that are just begging to be tied into social networking," said Jeff Hammond, a principal analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR).

"For example, think of a 'who's near me?' type capability for all the conferences of social events we go to, or a 'where's the best drink special tonight?' application for the weekend revelries," he said.

What makes geolocation collection hard, Stump said, is that thousands of location points are being collected every second - such as in the form of geotagged photos, Twitter messages and FourSquare information.

Typically, most information is clustered according to location, which means locations like New York City are way more popular than places like Lafayette. The popular locales can overload servers handling that data, but SimpleGeo is working to distribute the information evenly, Stump said.

By structuring the business so the development team has two-week tasks that ultimately accomplish SimpleGeo's short- and long-term goals, Galligan said his team can think on its feet and react quickly if something is or isn't working.

Too many young companies or first-time entrepreneurs are focused on the end result without seeing the overall picture, Galligan said.

SimpleGeo is in private beta with about 400 people testing the features now, but Stump said they plan on opening it to the public in March. It wouldn't be that soon without Galligan's and Stump's business strategy, they said.

In order for SimpleGeo to produce a product or feature that's 80 percent ready, his team would need until June. Instead, they launch products that are 30 percent ready knowing that users will find bugs that SimpleGeo can quickly fix.

Despite their ages, Stump is 29 and Galligan is 25, their experience and history speaks for itself.

Prior to joining forces, Galligan co-founded Socialthing Inc., which was acquired by AOL LLC, and Stump was the lead architect at Digg.

Their business plan and track records helped them land $1.5 million in funding within a month of switching gears toward what they're doing now. And they plan on raising more later this year.

The duo initially formed Crash Media Inc., which was focused on reality gaming for smart phones.

They planned on creating games like scavenger hunts and geocaching games where people would play using their cell phones. In a scavenger hunt, the user may have to go to a specific nearby location and upload a picture of a specific object.

But, after figuring out they needed the backend infrastructure to successfully launch a location-based gaming company, Galligan and Stump decided to change gears, and the company name, to pursue SimpleGeo.

"We're not a sexy forward-facing company," Galligan said. But the company is sexy to developers, Stump added.