The geocaching one-trick-pony Geomate.jr may be about to get a second life. We reported back in January that the product had been discontinued, but if you login to update your Geomate.jr today, you’ll get a message saying the page is temporarily out of service. The interesting part is that the page is “signed” by Brand 44.
A little digging turns up the following:
Brand 44 was started in 2011 by Edward O’Brien a Colorado native who wanted to create “Backyard Adventures” as recreational activities that family members of all ages and other groups could enjoy out of doors anywhere. Brand 44 is a distributor of licensed Boy Scouts of America products, Slackers® brand Slacklines and Ziplines. In April of 2012 Brand 44 acquired the Geomate Jr. product line from Apisphere Inc. “This is a great addition to our expanding line of adventure products that get young people and their families outside to explore their world and learn more about themselves,” says Ed O’Brien. At Brand 44, our goal is to provide great products to fine retailer worldwide.
Via Groundspeak
UPDATE: Here’s a news release I’ve received:
Brand 44 of Denver Colorado (brand44co.com) has recently purchased the Geomate Jr. Geocaching GPS product line from Apisphere Inc. of Dallas Texas. “This acquisition rounds out our growing geocaching product line and will enable us to offer select retailers the most comprehensive selection of geocaching products available anywhere,” said Edward O’Brien, Brand 44’s president.
Geocaching is a real world, outdoor treasure hunting game using a GPS enabled device. With your family and friends, navigate to a set of coordinates and attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location. Geocaching is one of the fast growing activities as there are over 6 million active geocachers, 1.6 million active geocaches, with over 75 million geocaches forecasted to be found in 2012!
Brand 44 is a creator of products that encourage families and kids to get outdoors and have fun. There is an alarming trend (Outdoor Retailer Association 2011 Recreation Report) showing substantial declines in outdoor participation by kids 6-12 in the last 5 years. Brand 44 is focused on making outdoor activities fun for the whole family.
The “Backyard Adventure” products include the Slackers™ Slacklines and Ziplines, The Geomate™ line of geocaching products including the popular Geomate Jr.® GPS device that comes preloaded with over 250,000 cache locations from the Geocaching.com database. Brand 44 is also the licensee of the “Be Prepared” line, a Boy Scouts of American branded line of camping and activity products.
I hope to be able to speak with Ed O’Brien sometime next week and learn more, in which case I’ll either update this or publish a new post.
About Rich Owings
Thanks for the update. I sure hope the Geomate Jr. is resurrected… particularly support for the Geomate Jr. update feature. The GeoMate Jr. is/was simply a great GPS for kids or those starting out geocaching who didn’t need all the bells and whistles or high cost. Mine has provided many good hours of geocaching and memories with my children. Long live the Geomate Jr.!!!
PLEASE bring back Geomate jr. and its update kit. I have had so much fun with friends and family, especially my granddaughter, all over the country.
From the Geomate jr Facebook page earlier today … “The Geomate Jr. product line has been purchased by Brand 44 of Colorado. In June we completed the re-hosting of the mygeomate.com website and are busy with some fixes for the update section, specifically, Eastern US, Canada and Europe. We hope to have this completed soon. We will then begin working on browser compatibility with Safari and current Firefox for Mac (version 5 works fine).
We are in full production and shipping and we are commited to keeping the Geomate Jr. #1 with geocachers worldwide.”
Yeah, I saw a tweet about it last night. Looks like good news. I may get a post up later this morning if time allows.
I am excited about the possibility of the geomate updates coming back. I am a fulltime RVer and it’s make caching so much easier for me. Thanks for the support……….mike
Still no fix for the geomate updates…..I really hope this is true and they get it done in a hurry. I’m ready to toss the 2 Geomates that I have!
Have you seen this?…
http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=287545
I updated my Geomate successfully July-18-2012 from the update website at: http://mygomate.com
This was on Windows 7 (IE 9) from the website and my Geomate was flashed with caches as of 7/18/2012. Long live the Geomate Jr. and update kit!
Before you toss your Geomates send them my way! There must be some of the 250,000 pre-loaded caches you have not found yet, even without an update. No?
Hello, I was so excited to hear that the Geomate was back. However, I am having problems loading regional files. A few months ago when the fate of the Geomate was in la-la land, I started using it for custom cache files (*.GPX). Now, when trying to load CRY files with the Geomate Loader I receive a “Flash programming failed…Cannot open port” message. Can you please help me fix this issue. Thanks……………..mike
Haven’t heard of that one. You may want to ask at http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=287545
This item is interesting. Would love to explore more about this. Thanks for sharing.