We’re Geeking to San Francisco

I’ve been in San Francisco for the last week in what could perhaps be described as a geek-pilgramage.

I took in a tour of the Googleplex in Mountainview (surely geek-mecca for the 2000’s) with Josh Bailey, an expat Kiwi who’s been with Google for a few years (and plays with Tesla coils in his spare time; 50,000 volts ain’t no thang…?!). The sheer scale of the campus was a bit foreboding for me coming from lil ol’ Nuw Zuland, especially with my small business / startup background, even if the location had the least corporate feel I’ve ever seen – littered with lego and beanbags, free massage signs and ping pong tables. I did have Google described to me as “one giant group of startups” with so many individual projects all doing their own thing; this makes sense given their prodigious tech output.

I spent the last two days at the Google I/O developer conference which culminated in Google announcing Google Wave; it’s not the simplest product to describe but may well be called Email 2.0. A product designed to answer the question -

What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?

It combines all the best features of email, instant messaging, wikis, blogging, document collaboration into one uber-tool. In fact it makes email look decidedly archaic and had 4,000 of the worlds geekiest geeks ooohing and aaaahing for 90 minutes. I don’t really see how it could be backwards compatible with “Email 1.0″ and I can’t imagine convincing my Grandma to upgrade but this is certainly how communication will look in the (not-too-distant?) future. 

Two moments that got rapturous applause:

1. A context sensitive spell checker that turned

Icland is an icland.

into

Iceland is an island.

2. Instant messaging with as-you-type foreign language translation.

Nerd-tastic.

Of course the niftiest geek moment of the conference for me came on day 1 when they gave away a Google Android Smartphone to every single attendee (but not Google employees!). It’s the HTC Magic; a very slick piece of hardware and a quality competitor for the iPhone (which every second person in the US seems to have). One was selling on eBay last night for over USD$600, a good markup on the $200 conference ticket! Mine will be coming back to NZ as it is completely unlocked and will work on either of our 3G networks. I can’t be carrying around a mobile that doesn’t have a Zenbu app on it so will have to look into an Android version to add to the iPhone and Windows Mobile apps soon!

Off to Yosemite Park for a few days to unplug from the matrix now, I’m all geeked out.

Doctor, doctor won’t you give me the news…

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Physicians & Surgeons is the 2nd most searched category in the yellow pages according to the Yellow Pages Association. Number 1 is restaurants and we’ve got that pretty well covered these days on Zenbu with over 4000 restaurants listed nationwide, but doctors are sadly missing from the landscape.

Back in November 2007 I approached my lifelong family doctor to talk about Zenbu and see if he could help get all the doctors on board as he was President of the Royal NZ General Practioners Association. His reply somewhat surprised me….

You are correct when you say we are not in Yellow Pages – quite deliberate. Like many Doctors we are overloaded with patients and are not trying to encourage new patients. So much so that I must ask you to remove the listing for us you put on the website please!

Maybe he saw Zenbu as advertising, I see it as an information resource – a digital collection of information freely available to you walking down the street in the real world. (The overwhelming majority of Zenbu visitors are people who are looking for a specific piece of information, an address or phone number, get it and leave. Many websites view a high Bounce Rate (people leaving your site without interacting past the first page they visit) as a sign of weakness, in Zenbu I see it as a sign of success as people have got what they need. Imagine if the Yellow Pages defined success as how many pages they made you look at to find the one thing you need?!)

It’s a very unique business who simply doesn’t want people to find them. I didn’t remove his listing; that information is publicly available in any number of places online and on the sign on the street outside their practice. But I did help him out by finding a new doctor…

It’s time to get the medical profession on Zenbu. I’m currently in discussions with the Ministry of Health about getting a list of Health Practitioners nationwide and that will be a massive step forward. In the meantime I found a few lists of general practices on Counties-Manukau and Auckland District Health Board sites and have loaded those. That means we’ve got 234 general practices on Zenbu right now but I hope one day soon you’ll be able to find every one of them.

April 2009 on Zenbu

1756 edits from 114 users in April, solid work team! The biggest editors were

zenbu 1369
hoogy 66
FantomFan 27
MauriceWinn 27
burgla 23
Gremlin 17
gavin 16
carlh 10
grant 9
xr6_112001 8
308gtb 8
Nedd 7
pcm 6
PGrueber 6
Nickb 6

One of the big wins of the month was the addition of 400 New Zealand physiotherapists. I tweaked my knee playing soccer and could not find a comprehensive collection of physios on Zenbu. I did however find the list of endorsed physios on the ACC website which were quickly added. We are still missing some physios, as not every physio is endorsed by ACC, so if your physio isn’t on Zenbu be sure to add them in!

Another, slightly embarrassing, anecdote from April was when we were contacted by the Communications Manager of VTNZ Vehicle Testing Stations and advised that somehow we had almost every single phone number for their locations incorrect. Provided with a current spreadsheet of all the VTNZ locations we quickly fixed that up and added a few new stations. Turns out a bunch of customers had complained to VTNZ about their details being wrong on Zenbu. Great that people are using Zenbu! Bummer we had those details wrong! Great that they are fixed now! Thanks to VTNZ for clearing it all up. 

If the details of a business on Zenbu are incorrect please feel free to edit it yourself. The information in Zenbu is prone to change regularly so we rely on you, the people on the street, to help make sure Zenbu reflects the real world.

Zenbu is edited collaboratively by volunteers from all around New Zealand. Anyone is welcome to add information and you do not need specialised qualifications to contribute. Zenbu’s aim is to capture basic factual information that would be available to anyone walking down the street in the real world. You can add new listings or edit existing ones in a simple online form. 

A few people have commented to me of late that they actually, really enjoy contributing to Zenbu which is cool to hear. I’m going to create some more material for the power users of the site soon, sharing some of my tips for how to get the most out of, and into, Zenbu. Thanks to everyone who edits, searches, uses and talks about Zenbu – keep it up!