Zenbu on iPhone

It’s 7.35pm on Saturday night and we’re scampering to setup the function room before the party guests start arriving at 8pm only to find the venue is missing a key audio cable. Without it we’ll be listening to classic hits all night. Aaaaaaaaa.

“Where could we possibly find this cable in Newmarket at this time?”
“The Warehouse would have it!”
“It’ll be shut.”
“No, it won’t.”

At times like this it is nice to have the entire Zenbu database in your pocket.  I would have been happy to just get the phone number of The Warehouse, to call and ask if they were open, but was stoked to find the hours listed too. All within a few seconds, and without a network connection used! Ran over, bought the cable and the party was on! Three cheers for the Zenbu iPhone application!

  

If you have an iPhone you can get your Zenbu iPhone application free on iTunes too. Version 1.0 is pretty basic featuring full text search of 51,281 Zenbu listings and full detail display. You can click on the phone number (to call), the website (to view) and the address (to see a map). These last two are the only things that require a net connection. All of this will take up less space on your phone than 2 songs.

We look forward to hearing your success stories from having Zenbu in your pocket.

August 2008 on Zenbu

Woohoo! Zenbu hit 50,000 records in August with a strong month of development from a wide group of users. All up 2749 edits from 57 users. The biggest ones were

zenbu     1755
dab672     296
hexzed     273
nzgooner     184
ParnellMainstreet     56
MauriceWinn     25
GaryMck     24
vrod_rider     23
burgla     15
Glars     14
ggl     8
garyt     6

Zenbu’s high numbers were largely due to the Christchurch City Council providing a list of 1841 food premises in the area (at least 300 of which were already in).

New user dab672 raced to the top of the charts by building up the information around the Lincoln, Christchurch area as well as adding the Hammer Hardware, Hirepool, Hirequip, Henry’s Spirits, Ravensdown & Europcar chains!

Hexzed continued adding detail around the Kapiti Coast area and NZGooner did the same around Papakura. Keep up the great work.

As always a big thank you to everyone who contributes!

In other news, NZ online mapping darling Zoomin has republished over 27,000 records from Zenbu on their site which is great recognition of Zenbu as a valued data source. Zenbu data is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License and Zoomin has given fair attribution by linking to Zenbu from each record. It’s currently a bit annoying that Zoomin ranks higher on Google sometimes for content taken from Zenbu, but hopefully that’ll work out in the long run!

We’ve submitted a simple Zenbu application to the iPhone appstore, it is still being processed so more about that as we hear from Apple.