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.

Anachronism in 2009?

 Anachronism: (noun) an artifact that belongs to another time

Another stack of YellowPages

 The Auckland 2009  Yellow Pages was delivered last week. In an age of extreme-green sensibilities, this is a monumental waste of trees. How long before we look at such a photo and laugh at the quaintness of it all?

Yellow Skype

Skype has partnered with Yellow Pages NZ to add all the Yellow listings into the Skype directory and, at least for the 3 month trial, allow free calls through Skype to any Yellow results.

It is an interesting promotion but I struggle to see the real value for Yellow.

• The biggest benefit for me as a user is that now I could search the Yellow directory without having to look at their (often nasty) results pages.
• The cost saving seems irrelevant as most people have free local calling already, even if that does mean the extra hassle of dialing a number instead of clicking a button, and we all know New Zealander’s are notoriously cheap.  
• Yellow advertisers and non advertisers results look the same. Advertisers are at the top but will this really drive advertising revenue? (which must be sinking like a stone as the generations who uses printed directories fade away)

This partnership makes the Skype directory infinitely better as the last time I tried it months (a year?) ago the results were dismally useless. Well done Skype but maybe I miss the significance for Yellow.

 

Chris Keall writes in the NBR

Forget Skype and Finda. A major Google Maps alliance, especially with some nifty location-awareness built-in or, say, a Yellow layer pre-installed on Vodafone’s coming Magic Google phone, would be the sort of big-bang move Yellow needs to remind people it exists.

Wait, you mean something kinda like the Zenbu iPhone app that came out last August??

 

Blair Glubb, Director of Digital Media at Yellow, says in the NZ Herald

The future for us is actually taking the information we’ve got and pushing it out via a whole bunch of channels.

which is very similar to something I regularly say

Zenbu is about taking the information visible to you as you walk down the street and making it available to you whereever and whenever you need it.

but that’s about where the similarities end….

Yellow Pages. Staff 500+. Revenue $293,000,000. Listings 250,000 (my best guess). 

Zenbu. Staff 0.5 (plus a dedicated community!). Revenue $5,000. Listings 67,000 (and growing!)

Who are you gonna put your money on?

Street View on Zenbu

Google launched Street View, street-level imagery, in New Zealand yesterday. This is seriously cool technology. A lot of the media yesterday seemed to focus on the negative and a small minority whining about privacy concerns. Puhlease. The photos are taken in a public place and nobody really cares to see you walking your dog or watering your lawn. Google has avenues for reporting imagery of concern so I hope to hear more positive news about all the cool stuff this enables.

Trade Me was first off the blocks integrating street view into their property listings. What a brilliant way to suss out the neighbourhood. Top marks.

Street View is now available on Zenbu too. See examples at the following links (click Street View above the map)

Mission Bay
http://www.zenbu.co.nz/entries/show/1099916-mission-bay

The Beehive (you’ll have to pan upwards to see the hive, not just the garage!)
http://www.zenbu.co.nz/entries/show/1098786-the-beehive

Tamaki Yacht Club (pan right for a great view of Rangitoto)
http://www.zenbu.co.nz/entries/show/1137377-tamaki-yacht-club

Very excited about this. Nice one Google.

Rating the Reviews, Reviewing the Ratings

We’ve had ratings and reviews available on Zenbu for over a year now. Recommendations are a natural part of everyday life - 

Where can I get some good Chinese takeaways around here?
Who is your dentist / plumber / hairdresser?

The ability to get feedback on an otherwise unknown business is extremely valuable. It is why good businesses flourish through word of mouth and bad businesses fail.

So it is with mixed feelings that we have just removed ratings and reviews from the site. I like the way this has reduced clutter in the page layout and I like the focus on the simple facts but I miss the potential that was offered by online reviews.

I simply wasn’t happy with the implementation or results. The uptake was slow and the signal to noise ratio was extremely low. Of 100 reviews 80 would be either the business owner posing as an employee to rave about themselves, or a slighted customer vehemently expressing their opinion. Now I do believe there is some minor value in both of these but it also leads us down the deep, dark rabbit hole of ‘editorial’, ‘owner’s right of reply’ & ‘libel’. Nasty.

There is beauty in the simplicity of Zenbu and the way it quickly provides you with the need to know factual details. That is something that we and our rapidly growing userbase definitely rates highly.

October 2008 on Zenbu

I am a bit late in posting this monthly review, in fact I completely forgot! Luckily a keen reader called me on it so here it is. Sorry for the delay. (The actual numbers are always available in real time from www.zenbu.co.nz/recent if I am late)

1690 edits from 92 users in October.  Thanks to everyone who took part. The big editors were

zenbu 739
GaryMck 308
hexzed 171
Glars 109
burgla 44
Addwords 37
barnaclebarnes 34
2dollarshop 23
HiggyRSQ 20
kitchen 18
MauriceWinn 16
vrod_rider 12
pablothesquirrel 10
Asgard 10

Some more of the local councils came to the party. Kawerau (thanks to barnaclebarnes), Nelson, and Invercargill (thanks to GaryMck). A few more councils (Napier, Ruapehu) surprised me by flat out declining to provide the information citing the privacy act. There are several problems with this to me

1. The privacy act applies to “living persons”, not businesses.

2. The trading name and physical address of a business which serves the public (part of the reason they require an Environmental Health license) is already in the public domain. I can walk down the street and see it. How can this be private?

3. I claim common sense, not legal knowledge, so I could be entirely wrong in the above, or the law may not reflect common sense, in which case all the councils who have provided the information must have been breaking the Privacy Act to do so. To date 15 councils have supplied the information free of charge, 3 more have offered the information for a fee [surely charging fees to provide privacy protected data would be cause for an enquiry!] and only 2 have claimed the privacy act. Another 18 have not responded, despite a legal requirement to do so, but that’s a different issue….

The only option left is to take the matter to http://www.ombudsmen.parliament.nz. (The Ombudsman is an independent investigator who investigates complaints about the administrative acts and decisions of central and local government agencies.) No progress beyond the notification of receipt so far, I’ll keep the blog posted.

Why Yellow Pages Suck

I came across a very interesting post by Brownbook about the results of a Kelsey Group (THE Yellow Pages industry consultants) study where they compared the feedback from industry execs and actual users of local search websites.

Factors rated as important by industry execs
#1 Ability to get additional info on businesses
#2 Access to useful maps and directions
#3 Depth of information provided
#4 Relevance of advertising
#5 Availability of additional information

Factors rated as important by a user panel
#1 Ease of starting search
#2 Ease of navigating site
#3 Accuracy of results
#4 Overall layout/organization
#5 Ability to refine search
*** none of the above even featured in the industry list ***

There is a complete disconnect between what users want, and what the yellow pages industry wants to provide them!

I’ve always built Zenbu with a focus on users and a bloated pre-internet industry which, by necessity, is driven by advertiser demand will not be able to compete longterm in this new paradigm.

iPhone 2.0

Apple tells me Version 2.0 has been accepted, guess my 5000 Heil Steve’s to the mighty Ringo deity last night paid off. iTunes is still showing 1.0 for me but hopefully it will update soon.

2.0 features ’search’ and ‘find nearest’ functionality as well as the latest Zenbu data. Upgrade essential.

The biggest bummer for me about this version is that the screenshot I’ve chosen to demonstrate Zenbu uses a search for ‘burgers ponsonby’. Well, I was in Ponsonby on the weekend and there’s a new burger store! Murder Burger is in Zenbu now but didn’t make it into the 2.0 release. Even more of an incentive for me to extend the app to include data updates outside the App Store!

September 2008 on Zenbu

What a month.  I know, I know, I say it every month but this was the biggest, bestest month yet.

• Visits were up 80% on August, now regularly hitting 2000 unique visitors a day,
• 90% of that traffic comes directly from Google, the search engine took a fervent interest in Zenbu last month with a
• 300% growth in Zenbu pages in the Google index. 

Anecdotally I am hearing more and more stories of people who get the information they need from Zenbu, which is great when you live in a technology bubble and the majority of interaction with users is anonymous.

There was an excellent count of 2896 edits on the site from 97 unique users. The long tail of small editors just gets longer every month which is very cool, and the regular editors keep up the impressive work.
 
zenbu 1039
hexzed  766
peejayw 288
Glars 205
rc8 168
fuhsiang  88
freddo  41
GaryMck 35
burgla  31
stridey 17
MauriceWinn 16
reganl  12
chichi  11
bulkhead  11
HiggyRSQ  11
The-Organist  10

The councils continued to drip feed the food premise information with
Hamilton data coming from rc8
New Plymouth from zenbu
Invercargill from GaryMck (not in yet, processing now)
Whangarei from peejayw

Hexzed stands out as my user of the month for September. No bulk uploading contributed to his 766 edits, every single one was done by hand, putting in a ton of effort around the Paraparaumu area as well as adding/fixing up chain stores all around the country. Bravo.

 

Zenbu at #5 on the app store

The Zenbu iPhone application took off to high acclaim on Sep 6. I wasn’t really watching the first few weeks but did notice it at number 5 on the top free apps list for the NZ store on Sep 22, did anyone else see it higher? (Apple doesn’t provide any download count statistics amazingly) Version 2.0 will be out shortly and features a massively improved detail display and ‘nearest’ search functionality. Rad. Of course it will also feature the very latest dataset from www.zenbu.co.nz, so get updating…

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.