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.

March 2009 on Zenbu

Another solid month in Zenbu world. 3142 edits from 114 users including a few new users who shot to the head of the class!

zenbu 2325
MainstreetWanganui 172
magician 155
hexzed 99
garyt 81
GaryMck 49
vrod_rider 31
burgla 18
MauriceWinn 14
PGrueber 12
segfault 11
Linzi 10
Gremlin 10

Mainstreet Wanganui is an organisation with a goal of promoting the Wanganui town centre. What better way than to put every business in Wanganui into Zenbu (and seamlessly from there into the NZOpenGPS Garmin maps, the Zenbu iPhone app, the Zenbu Windows Mobile app …). It was a pleasure to work with the Marketing Manager Louise at Mainstreet Wanganui who “got” the concept and I quote 

Of course we would like our members to have a broader search-base.

Great stuff. Magician is a new member who went to task on his local area. Welcome to the community Magician.

Thanks of course to the long time faithfuls, we wouldn’t be where we are without you!

In technical developments March saw the release of the Windows Mobile Zenbu app , the addition of Share on Facebook links to the entry pages (we are so down with the kids), and a Google Earth tab on the entry maps – pretty nifty, just download the Google Earth plugin and do a flyby of any Zenbu entry. Rad!

The Zenbu iPhone app 2.0

Over 1600 people downloaded the Zenbu application in September and I’m sure every single one of them will be stoked to get the updated version. It’s under review by Apple right now so should be out soon, I’ll let you know when if iTunes doesn’t do it for me. (iTunes will tell you when updates are available for any applications you have and prompt you to download them, nifty).

Exactly one week after the app went live, Apple released their 2.1 firmware. But the firmware is available to users before the SDK is available to developers so there was nothing to do but groan when this firmware introduced a very nasty bug to the Zenbu app. The startup screens from 2.0 and 2.1 below, can you spot the difference?

 

 

Nasty. Only one line of code to fix but it was definitely a hack of Windows programming proportions, oh Apple, you were supposed to be better. I forgive you, but only because the Find Nearest functionality with the Zenbu database in my (admittedly sexy) 3G iPhone is so damn cool it makes everybody go – wow.

Here are some sneak preview screenshots from version 2.0

Your phone knows where you are so you don’t need to tell it, just ask it for what you want and there it is. Rad. The app still requires no network connection – unless you elect to load the preview map in the detail view; which loads directly inside the Zenbu app and comes with a location marker (thanks to the user feedback for this idea).

One thing I’m particularly happy with is the engineering behind the Nearest colouring. (See how the font colour of the Nearest button in the above screenshot is orange).
The problem is that the phone identifies its location using a variety of methods (cell tower triangulation, GPS) which have varying accuracy and will obviously affect the relevance of your distance sorted results.

I battled with a number of ideas before settling on a choice that hopefully is so intuitive that people will think it was the obvious, only choice.

The Nearest button uses a font colour which represents the accuracy of your location.

Red = Location unknown, Nearest search unusable
Dark Orange = Location accuracy > 500m
Light Orange = Location accurate to 100~500m
Green = Location accurate to <100m

The Green Nearest will probably only happen with a GPS fix, so you would need to be outside or have a clear view of a reasonable amount of the sky. The cell tower fix happens almost instantaneously so you can get a usable result very quickly. Cell tower accuracy will vary with the number of cell towers around but that should directly correlate to how many people and ‘things’ are around so should be perfect for most usage cases.

All a bit of a tease as the app isn’t out yet, coming soon, coming soon!

(If I’ve lost anyone with the geek speak, lemme know and I’ll try to explain it in language that doesn’t require 12hrs a day of starting at a screen on the internet…)

Zenbu API

Part of the vision with Zenbu is to provide ubiquitous and open digital access to the very same information that is available to you walking down the street. Who does what, where and when is it open?

A key component of that is providing an API (Application Programming Interface) so that 3rd parties can access the raw Zenbu data in real time and use it in their own websites and applications.

Now the Zenbu API is live. There are no commercial boundaries on the API for up to 10,000 requests per day – above that and you have to work out a deal with us. The API adds to the Zenbu Widget as another simple and powerful way to provide local search and content on your website.

We really look forward to seeing the innovative ideas and businesses powered by Zenbu data.

Microformats

Google Maps Official Blog posted about adding microformats to Google maps today. It’s not often that we get to say we did it before Google, but we did, we did! Microformats have been built into Zenbu since day 1. No reason not to enable people to export the data as easily as possible with our open license.

Microformats are a way of telling your browser exactly which parts of the page are the contact details – name, address, phone, etc. That way plugins like Tails for Firefox can do fancy things with those contacts like export them to your address book in one click. Nifty.

Ratings & Reviews

We’ve added the ability for members to rate and review entries on Zenbu. All ratings & reviews are public so you can check what a reviewer says about other entries and quickly see if you can trust their opinion.

It’s one more step towards our vision of Zenbu as a digital solution for those everyday questions

• Where is the nearest ATM?
• What’s the name of that cafe in Remuera?
• Can you recommend me a restaurant in town?

which is really exciting!

Feel the Freeze

Today we launched the ‘Freeze’. (No, not some miniature movie villain that comes with a happy meal)

Listings on Zenbu can be edited by any registered user. Some business owners may prefer the security of knowing that no third party can edit their listing. They can choose to ‘Freeze’ their listing, so that only they can edit the listing, at a cost of $1 per month.

Zenbu provides free tools like RSS feeds on your listing data so that you could monitor a listing for any change. The ‘Freeze’ gives you the opportunity to not have to worry about it (and support Zenbu!). A frozen listing will also have certain bonus features available, but still under development…, like document upload – think brochures or menus.

It would be great if we didn’t have to worry about hooligans defacing our real world or virtual property. The beauty of virtual worlds like Zenbu and Wikipedia is that the community will largely look after the site themselves. I truly believe this and trust that people only freeze their listings for the bonus added features it also gives them!

Zenbu to Google Earth. Come in?

In our continuing quest for nifty features we’ve added Google Earth compatible KML files to our export data types. This means you can export Zenbu data directly into Google Earth.

The best thing I can think of to do with it is a virtual fly by of New Zealand’s golf courses, but maybe you can do better? Anyway, it’s cool and live now.

To blog is human

Well it’s about bloody time I started a dialog with the world at large to highlight the developments on Zenbu and give respect where due. Here goes…

rc8 did the major leg work on getting all public hospitals loaded. Sweet.

cloggy has finished off the Mitre 10 chain.

zenbu has added all fire stations and police stations

Something for the GPS people
On the entry edit page you can now enter Latitude, Longitude coordinates to center the map on a pre-verified point. No need to attempt to visually match the on screen coordinates to the ones you had already!