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!