October 2009 on Zenbu

There were 5,425 edits from 118 different users in October with 110,000 unique visitors and over 160,000 pageviews. The biggest editors were

zenbu	4694
pb12	195
garyt	81
burgla	79
brownees172	59
GaryMck	43
MauriceWinn	23
hoogy	18
jonzee	16
rodo	12

Nice one team! The bulk of the Zenbu numbers was made up of the entry of every Early Childhood Centre (kindergartens and childcare centres) nationwide from a Ministry of Education list. I’m not actively looking for any of these myself but I know that a lot my friends soon will be so it’s great to have this available.

The number of edits on Zenbu will always be several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of views, but as the visibility of Zenbu data scales up, up and away (with increased exposure on search engines and third party sites) we will pull in more and more editors. Reducing the “barriers to entry” is important which is why we try to make the process of editing so simple that anyone can do it with zero training. We do appreciate the ideas we get from the community about how to improve this so please keep that coming.

Zenbu NZ now has well over 82,000 listings, 6 figures isn’t far away and that is exciting!

Find the nearest…. payphone?!

Did you know that you can find every single payphone in New Zealand on Zenbu? Earlier this year Kiwitonita got Telecom to release this data and we loaded almost 3000 payphone locations onto Zenbu. (There are actually over 4000 payphones in NZ but lots of them are paired up at the same spot.)

I can’t say I’ve had a real life use case for this data yet, being able to find the nearest payphone from your mobile phone has been of questionable use, so it was very nice to receive this email today.

For a reason I won’t bother you with ( if I say legal stuff that should cover all bases! ) I needed to know if I recalled correctly that there was a payphone in Mt. Eden Road Auckland that I’d used when I last visited from Australia – your telecom site was about as helpful as – well, our Telstra – need I say more – maybe you got the info from there but I got everything else but. But I typed in the location on Zenbu & that showed me the nearest payphone! Appreciated. B.

Nifty! I knew it would be useful for something.

Mobile Zenbu

Data costs on NZ cellular networks have been somewhat prohibitive for the average user for a long time but have finally become affordable. For $10 a month I get a 100MB package of data as an addon to my Vodafone account. It won’t have you cancelling your broadband connection but it does give you the freedom to do simple online lookups at will.

In order to provide mobile users with a more tailored experience, www.zenbu.co.nz now comes in a mobile-optimised format. This means pages stripped of graphics with static maps that will be fast to load on your 3G or Edge connection. Just go to the same URL as always, the server will auto-detect mobile browsers and show appropriate content.

For the Zenbu junky like myself it means it’s dead simple to lookup and edit business details while I’m there staring in their window. I dream of an army of Zenbu editors correcting details on the things they visit every day so that everybody can have online, real time access to the very same information we could see walking down the street. (Not quite as catchy as Martin Luther King’s dreams but each to their own!)

Another nifty development on Mobile is the GeoVector World Surfer application available on iPhone and Android. It’s an American company with development based here in NZ that uses appropriate local channels to serve relevant local search results. I found out last week that Zenbu is one of the feature channels for New Zealand users which is very cool! (So pretty to see the Zenbu logo alongside internet giants Google & Yahoo on the GeoVector Channels page!!) They are using the Zenbu XML api to get live search results. More about GeoVector on Stuff.

World Surfer is the closest thing I’ve seen to Augmented Reality (AR) using Zenbu data, or any NZ data at all.

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmentedby) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.

AR is something I think we’ll see a lot more of in coming years. Today’s leading mobile phones, and tomorrow’s everyday phones, can use their full array of sensors (GPS, digital compass & live video) with data sources like Zenbu to present us with depths of information about the world around us. Part of me sees it as gimicky, part of me thinks it’s very cool indeed. The applications using it and real world use cases are still coming. What do you think of  (the possibilities of) AR?

September 2009 on Zenbu

There were 3301 edits from 147 users in September with over 100,000 unique visitors to the website for the fourth month in a row.  It’s so encouraging to know that Zenbu is helping thousands of New Zealander’s every month find the basic information they need. Thanks to everyone using Zenbu, searchers and editors.

Top 10 editors in September were

zenbu	2422
rc8	333
hoogy	90
GaryMck	55
pb12	48
brownees172	31
tgclark	24
MauriceWinn	21
garyt	18
burgla	17

Vianet provided basic information on over 1500 accommodations nationwide and Booking.com added another 100; this is an excellent boost to one of the most searched categories.

RC8 provided a bunch of spreadsheets of chain stores: Bed Bath and Beyond, Frank Casey Suit Hire, Heathcote Appliances, Les Mills, Pascoes, SBS Bank, Shanton, Pumpkin Patch, Urban Angel and Dog’s Breakfast. Some of the Store Locators for such chains can leave a lot to be desired so it’s great to know this info is readily available in Zenbu.

Hoogy is working on a project to share the locations of Free WiFi spots around NZ and is kindly updating Zenbu as well. Great stuff Hoogy.

GaryMck is making edits all over the country – either he travels a lot or he is letting his fingers do the walking from his desktop! It’s amazing how much Zenbu-ing can be done from the comfort of your home combining internet research, StreetView, Satellite imagery and local knowledge. The Add Neighbour link on each entry page was added this month as an assist for you desktop Zenbu’ers as a way to help people make sure every shop on a street is in Zenbu.

pb12 is another cool story. He is a user of the NZOGPS Garmin GPS maps, which uses Zenbu data freely under our CC license, and noted that he couldn’t find his local Hamilton sports park, because they weren’t entered. Working from a list on the Hamilton City Council website he added every park in the city with details about the facilities available. Very cool. Go Hamilton! Go Zenbu!

Zenbu on iPhones September 2009

Version 2.27 of the Zenbu iPhone app is out today, almost 1 year after it first went live. Thousands of New Zealanders have downloaded the app and use it as a mobile reference directroy on a regular basis. The app is entirely offline so we don’t have any statistics but anecdotal evidence suggests it is well used and appreciated.

Even a few foreigners have used the app; we got a glowing reference from a German tourist who raved about having Zenbu on his iPhone during his stay here (and the cheap Zenbu wifi available nationwide).

Back in February I was contacted by a student in the final semester of his degree course in Computer Engineering at Manukau Institute of Technology. He asked if he could use the Zenbu database for a “location awareness” software project, sketches below, a search app similar to the Zenbu iPhone app. Zenbu data is Creative Commons Attribution Licensed so of course I said yes. I was even able to help Jay along with some of my experiences learned in developing the original app.

In April Jay released Find!NZ on the Apple App Store. After 3 days it was top of the Free Navigation category. It is still top of the Navigation category over 4 months later! Jay has told me the app has had over 20,000 downloads in that time which is amazing. Between the Zenbu app and the Find!NZ app, Zenbu data must be on almost every iPhone in NZ. Wow.

Last week I finally got to meet Jay and I gratefully accepted his offer to buy me lunch. It turns out that Jay was contacted by an impressed user of Find!NZ and offered a full time job as an iPhone app developer which I think is really cool. Jay may not remember but in his original email to me he wrote

I actually have no intention to be a permanent iPhone App developer.

But Jay does have a family and bills to pay so he is now gainfully employed as an iPhone developer. Congratulations Jay.

Find!NZ is now up to its third or fourth version and it is pretty shit hot. Jay was a Graphic Designer in a past life and that shows through in the beautiful icons throughout the app, the fact that he is now an iPhone developer wizard certainly adds a lot of polish to the app too. Whether you have the Zenbu app or not, I highly recommend checking Find!NZ out.

Jay and I talked about a bunch of possible future developments (just imagine two iPhone nerds bubbling over the potential)  and I plan to work with him to fine tune Zenbu usage on the iPhone. One of Jay’s requests was for more Public Toilets on Zenbu! Councils often have lists of these so everybody do Jay a favour and look on your local council website for a list of toilet locations. If you send them through in a spreadsheet to admin@zenbu.co.nz we’ll get them loaded up on the site for Jay and all the iPhone users.

(I wonder if this story will encourage other developers to develop applications using Zenbu data. Mobile apps for Symbian and Blackberry would be prime candidates. It might not make you rich but the fame could take you places!)

August 2009 on Zenbu

2179 edits from 135 different users in August bringing us up to over 75,000 entries with over 100,000 unique users of the site in the month. That doesn’t even begin to factor in the people using Zenbu data on their mobiles, iPhones and GPS units (as all that usage is offline or offsite). It’s really cool to see the continued growth of the data and people who value it. Thank you to everyone using Zenbu!

Top 10 editors in August were

zenbu	1492
Kiwi_Moose	144
GaryMck	120
rc8	96
burgla	60
MauriceWinn	22
TRNZ	22
hoogy	16
Tekake	15
garyt	9

One nice big easy win was the addition of 500+ parks and reserves maintained by the Waitakere City Council; handy for finding that nearby park.

Manukau City Council finally coughed up (a mere 9 months after asking) their list of Environmental Health licensed premises which added 360 entries including a lot of hairdressers and some new bars and restaurants.

Councils are a great potential source of information in New Zealand. Take a look at your local council website and see if they publish information about their parks, toilets, libraries, cemeteries or any other public facilities. If we can pull that down into a spreadsheet we can upload it all into Zenbu for everybody to access. Bring it on!

Start a directory website in 5 easy steps!

1. Buy some software like http://www.phpmydirectory.com
2. Buy some data with a republishing license (harder than it sounds)
3. Make some bold claims about your position in the marketplace (“Number One Bestest Directory Ever!”)
4. Start charging excessive amounts for priority listings and watch the business roll in.
5. Go sip martinis.

I came across an article about a new business directory that is already clashing with Yellow Pages who disagree with their statement that they are the “biggest tradespersons’ directory in New Zealand”.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/2763347/Businessmen-clash-with-Yellow-pages

Tradesmen Direct must have backed down quickly because I can’t see this claim anywhere on their site now; it is now “New Zealand’s Number One Trade Directory”. That claim is patently ridiculous to me too. A directory can only measure its success by the number of people using it and I’m sceptical that a 3 month old website with under a 1000 pages listed on Google is “number one”.

It’s great that the cost of entry into the directory market is close to nothing. It drives competition and means the consumer should get a great deal. It does mean that there are some amazingly crap websites (Tradesmen Direct actually looks alright) out there but they usually won’t go the distance.

I wish Zenbu was in a place to compete for the “Number One Tradesperson Directory” category but it is definitely weak in that department right now. Please go on and add your local electrician or plumber (or see the recipe above and buy me a martini).

The Yellow iPhone

Wouldn’t you know it? A month after I go on record saying Yellow is too big and slow to make an iPhone app, they release one. I considered having to eat crow but it did take them 18 months  from the iPhones SDK release so I stand behind my original statement; 18 months is light years in the internet era. (And remember it was Yellow who sponsored the stunt for “Jonny” to stand in line for 3 days to purchase the world’s first 3G iPhone, imagine if the first app he installed was the Yellow app…)

The guys at iPhoneNZ have a balanced review and recommend keeping it as a backup to Zenbu. http://www.iphonewzealand.co.nz/2009/all/review-yellow/

But I do like Peter’s simple take on it. http://peteinakl.tumblr.com/post/161001874/yellow-pages-iphone-app-personally-i-think

I think Zenbu has this space sewn up [better] already.

I wanted to review it myself but I can’t find it on the appStore; searching for Yellow NZ returns no results this morning and nobody is linking to it… Why release a promotional video with no product to back it up? I’m sure it will be out soon and maybe I’ll use it as a backup myself.

Edit: Fri Aug 21

The Yellow iPhone app is out now. Congratulations to the developers, I think the iPhone app is actually superior to the website service! The interface is boiled down to the bare essentials and avoids all the extra clicks Yellow forces onto users for simple requests like – to see a phone number. The results seem to be ordered by distance (a nearest search) rather than the website advertising-dollar-spend-centric-sort so are much more useful.

They’ve used the iPhone OS 3.0 features extensively (in app Maps and Email) and it works well, Apple has really hit the sweetspot with this evolution. The Zenbu app will still be my goto app, having the entire directory already offline on the phone makes it an ideal reference tool which is 95% of what I do with it.

Unfortunately they’re also constrained by the Yellow search service as the results come in live from the Yellow servers. I found a perfect example in 5 minutes of playing with the app. One of the baked in favourite searches (a nice feature) is ‘Taxi’. But the results include Tax Accountants and even the New Zealand Men’s Clinic which services erectile dysfunction in “labourers, lawyers, doctors and taxi drivers”.

Luckily for Yellow such problems should be easily fixed, they have all the data which is the biggest hurdle. All they need to do now is fix search (or give it up to Google), ditch the paper publication, chop their workforce and open up their data. Welcome to Yellow 2.0, don’t hold your breath…

July 2009 on Zenbu

2928 edits from 126 users on Zenbu in July. The biggest editors were

zenbu	1608
TeamHunterGatherer	624
psychochicken	124
SteveA	92
burgla	53
tepuna	34
jfactor	27
brownees172	27
jonzee	27
Gremlin	26
MauriceWinn	24
vrod_rider	22
skycity	21
garyt	13
Linzi	12
paul111	8
Spiker	8
mightyman	8

An exciting development which I hinted at last month was the addition of almost every car dealer in the country by TeamHunterGatherer from http://autotrader.co.nz/. Thanks very much Autotrader! It’s wonderful to hear from people who ‘get’ the Zenbu concept and see that we can all be better off by sharing.

psychochicken added the petrol brand names, such as Synergy or Ultimate, to petrol stations around the country. Petrol stations do push that brand on their signs so it makes sense for it to be in Zenbu too although I’d love to know how people are using that as I’m not sure myself!

SteveA did a lot of work on all the Speed Cameras which are listed in Zenbu. I understand these are exported and used in the nzopengps.org Garmin map project to provide custom alerts for GPS users. Very nifty, very cool.

tepuna is a new member who went to town on their local area Te Puna / Bethlehem / Omokoroa (just north of Tauranga). I love to see people get involved and add/edit lots of content in their locality. It makes Zenbu useful for them and everyone else who goes looking for things in the area. Nice one!

Actually a whole bunch of big editors last month so apologies for not hat tipping everybody but thank you to each and every one of you. Cheers!

iPhone New Zealand

The team at www.iphonenewzealand.co.nz have written an article about the Zenbu iPhone app and given it a glowing recommendation. Thank’s guys!

It’s a new site but they’re rapidly putting up some great content so if you have an iPhone then I recommend checking it out.