Where 2.0 Wow

The O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference kicked off this week promising to “look ahead to the future of geospatial”. I’ve just seen 2 things launched there and wow.

Google Maps Street View – 360° panoramas of street-level imagery on Google Maps. Amazon’s A9 had static street images that I thought was pretty cool, this takes it to a whole new level. Seeing is believing.

GeoCommons.com – a site where users can use a massive base of free geodata, as well as adding their own, to create heat maps and smart geo-visualisations. The mind just runs away with the possibilities. (Helpful that they use the same Creative Commons attribution license as Zenbu does too.)

‘wow’ sums it up nicely.

Yellow Relaunch

I attended a sneak-preview presentation of the new Yellow Pages website last night. There some key points to me

• Studies show 40% of online ad spend in USA is on search, 56% in UK
• YP has relationships with 200,000 advertisers in NZ
• This is the first major update to their site since it launched in 1997
• They have rebranded as Yellow (no ‘Pages’) to reflect their cross-medium coverage

The site itself looked pretty good. I didn’t expect to be impressed but I wasn’t underwhelmed. They are the monster in the marketplace and although they have all the data and all the customers, they are only just getting up to parity with the local competitors on features.

YP reached out to its advertisers late last year for more information. They got a 60% response with mail, email and phone followup which is extremely good – maybe we were all just amazed that YP was, for once, offering ‘more’ without charging more. Areas of focus seem to be Opening Hours, Parking Availability & Payment Methods. I see the last two being of marginal interest – I can usually find a park if I want one and everywhere accepts eftpos or credit…

One nice feature was the integration of the print ad that cost you thousands of dollars into the online listing as a picture.

They’re moved to using radial search, like the Zenbu Find Nearest, rather than just direct text which should allow much more tolerant results.

They’ve added a login and address book function, like Zenbu Bookmarks.

Overall Yellow is finally focusing a bit more on what the user needs rather than just the advertiser. The results are still ordered with something called ‘relevancy priority’ – which was followed by a little quick talking that seemed to mean there would still be a strong weighting for advertisers. Of course the presentation was generally to an advertising crowd, so that’s what they wanted!

The new site will be launching in a few weeks. Congratulations Yellow, you’ve given me a nice shiny new target.

Bill Gates: Yellow Pages Usage to Drop to Zero in 5 years

I remember being somewhat disillusioned with Bill Gates crystal-ball-gazing 1996 book The Road Ahead. There wasn’t much discussion of The Internet and I guess that shows in how Microsoft has lost ground to the new wave of Internet companies since then.

However recent comments by Bill at Microsoft’s Strategic Account Summit resonate strongly with me.

“The Yellow Pages usage among people below 50 will drop to near zero within five years”
“Paper-based directories will be mostly obsolete”
“This is a wrenching change for them”

Touche!

Old School

One of the most significant differences about ‘internet’ businesses are their ability to ‘release early and often’, a concept also known as the ‘continual beta’. I’ve worked with pre-internet businesses who plan website releases years in advance so it’s a real joy to be releasing new features on Zenbu days after we’ve thought of them.

A couple of news articles today reminded me of the troubles facing these old school businesses.

This article about the Canada Yellow Pages Group who have been reviewing their nomenclature for several years to add terms like ’sushi’ and ‘tapas’ – next year.

But this article about the NZ Yellow Pages just reeks of something else. It’s against the terms and conditions to use the YP for business purposes so they’re approaching businesses and Government agencies who they suspect of misusing the yellowpages site – to make lists of potential customers. YP swears it’s not a matter of money and that they are doing this for their customers benefit – even though you can legally obtain that same data from them at a price.

Maybe I’m just bitter cause I don’t get to have release parties for my website… I’m off to the yellow.co.nz relaunch party on Thursday, can’t wait to see what they’ve been working on in the last 6 months!

Yellow Pages Vandalised

Yellow Pages hits the front page of the news again. Some prankster spent $2700 putting an ad in the Auckland Yellow Pages paperback directory, which had close to a million copies distributed last month, for Ray’s Gym in Papakura. Ray’s gym is real but the ad slanderously refers to it as a “Gay Lesbian Homosexual Fitness Centre”.

Not only does Ray Parker have to suffer this ignominy for the rest of the year, but the person who placed the ad ‘requested confidentiality’ so he is having to battle the Privacy Act to find out who they were!

My heart goes out to Ray, maybe his free listing in Zenbu will help make up for the business he loses from this fiasco.

P.S. If someone went to the bother of playing such a prank on Zenbu, it would be so easy to fix as not to be worthy of any press. See our security page for details.