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.

Zenbu on iPhones September 2009

Version 2.27 of the Zenbu iPhone app is out today, almost 1 year after it first went live. Thousands of New Zealanders have downloaded the app and use it as a mobile reference directroy on a regular basis. The app is entirely offline so we don’t have any statistics but anecdotal evidence suggests it is well used and appreciated.

Even a few foreigners have used the app; we got a glowing reference from a German tourist who raved about having Zenbu on his iPhone during his stay here (and the cheap Zenbu wifi available nationwide).

Back in February I was contacted by a student in the final semester of his degree course in Computer Engineering at Manukau Institute of Technology. He asked if he could use the Zenbu database for a “location awareness” software project, sketches below, a search app similar to the Zenbu iPhone app. Zenbu data is Creative Commons Attribution Licensed so of course I said yes. I was even able to help Jay along with some of my experiences learned in developing the original app.

In April Jay released Find!NZ on the Apple App Store. After 3 days it was top of the Free Navigation category. It is still top of the Navigation category over 4 months later! Jay has told me the app has had over 20,000 downloads in that time which is amazing. Between the Zenbu app and the Find!NZ app, Zenbu data must be on almost every iPhone in NZ. Wow.

Last week I finally got to meet Jay and I gratefully accepted his offer to buy me lunch. It turns out that Jay was contacted by an impressed user of Find!NZ and offered a full time job as an iPhone app developer which I think is really cool. Jay may not remember but in his original email to me he wrote

I actually have no intention to be a permanent iPhone App developer.

But Jay does have a family and bills to pay so he is now gainfully employed as an iPhone developer. Congratulations Jay.

Find!NZ is now up to its third or fourth version and it is pretty shit hot. Jay was a Graphic Designer in a past life and that shows through in the beautiful icons throughout the app, the fact that he is now an iPhone developer wizard certainly adds a lot of polish to the app too. Whether you have the Zenbu app or not, I highly recommend checking Find!NZ out.

Jay and I talked about a bunch of possible future developments (just imagine two iPhone nerds bubbling over the potential)  and I plan to work with him to fine tune Zenbu usage on the iPhone. One of Jay’s requests was for more Public Toilets on Zenbu! Councils often have lists of these so everybody do Jay a favour and look on your local council website for a list of toilet locations. If you send them through in a spreadsheet to admin@zenbu.co.nz we’ll get them loaded up on the site for Jay and all the iPhone users.

(I wonder if this story will encourage other developers to develop applications using Zenbu data. Mobile apps for Symbian and Blackberry would be prime candidates. It might not make you rich but the fame could take you places!)

August 2009 on Zenbu

2179 edits from 135 different users in August bringing us up to over 75,000 entries with over 100,000 unique users of the site in the month. That doesn’t even begin to factor in the people using Zenbu data on their mobiles, iPhones and GPS units (as all that usage is offline or offsite). It’s really cool to see the continued growth of the data and people who value it. Thank you to everyone using Zenbu!

Top 10 editors in August were

zenbu	1492
Kiwi_Moose	144
GaryMck	120
rc8	96
burgla	60
MauriceWinn	22
TRNZ	22
hoogy	16
Tekake	15
garyt	9

One nice big easy win was the addition of 500+ parks and reserves maintained by the Waitakere City Council; handy for finding that nearby park.

Manukau City Council finally coughed up (a mere 9 months after asking) their list of Environmental Health licensed premises which added 360 entries including a lot of hairdressers and some new bars and restaurants.

Councils are a great potential source of information in New Zealand. Take a look at your local council website and see if they publish information about their parks, toilets, libraries, cemeteries or any other public facilities. If we can pull that down into a spreadsheet we can upload it all into Zenbu for everybody to access. Bring it on!

Start a directory website in 5 easy steps!

1. Buy some software like http://www.phpmydirectory.com
2. Buy some data with a republishing license (harder than it sounds)
3. Make some bold claims about your position in the marketplace (“Number One Bestest Directory Ever!”)
4. Start charging excessive amounts for priority listings and watch the business roll in.
5. Go sip martinis.

I came across an article about a new business directory that is already clashing with Yellow Pages who disagree with their statement that they are the “biggest tradespersons’ directory in New Zealand”.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/2763347/Businessmen-clash-with-Yellow-pages

Tradesmen Direct must have backed down quickly because I can’t see this claim anywhere on their site now; it is now “New Zealand’s Number One Trade Directory”. That claim is patently ridiculous to me too. A directory can only measure its success by the number of people using it and I’m sceptical that a 3 month old website with under a 1000 pages listed on Google is “number one”.

It’s great that the cost of entry into the directory market is close to nothing. It drives competition and means the consumer should get a great deal. It does mean that there are some amazingly crap websites (Tradesmen Direct actually looks alright) out there but they usually won’t go the distance.

I wish Zenbu was in a place to compete for the “Number One Tradesperson Directory” category but it is definitely weak in that department right now. Please go on and add your local electrician or plumber (or see the recipe above and buy me a martini).

The Yellow iPhone

Wouldn’t you know it? A month after I go on record saying Yellow is too big and slow to make an iPhone app, they release one. I considered having to eat crow but it did take them 18 months  from the iPhones SDK release so I stand behind my original statement; 18 months is light years in the internet era. (And remember it was Yellow who sponsored the stunt for “Jonny” to stand in line for 3 days to purchase the world’s first 3G iPhone, imagine if the first app he installed was the Yellow app…)

The guys at iPhoneNZ have a balanced review and recommend keeping it as a backup to Zenbu. http://www.iphonewzealand.co.nz/2009/all/review-yellow/

But I do like Peter’s simple take on it. http://peteinakl.tumblr.com/post/161001874/yellow-pages-iphone-app-personally-i-think

I think Zenbu has this space sewn up [better] already.

I wanted to review it myself but I can’t find it on the appStore; searching for Yellow NZ returns no results this morning and nobody is linking to it… Why release a promotional video with no product to back it up? I’m sure it will be out soon and maybe I’ll use it as a backup myself.

Edit: Fri Aug 21

The Yellow iPhone app is out now. Congratulations to the developers, I think the iPhone app is actually superior to the website service! The interface is boiled down to the bare essentials and avoids all the extra clicks Yellow forces onto users for simple requests like – to see a phone number. The results seem to be ordered by distance (a nearest search) rather than the website advertising-dollar-spend-centric-sort so are much more useful.

They’ve used the iPhone OS 3.0 features extensively (in app Maps and Email) and it works well, Apple has really hit the sweetspot with this evolution. The Zenbu app will still be my goto app, having the entire directory already offline on the phone makes it an ideal reference tool which is 95% of what I do with it.

Unfortunately they’re also constrained by the Yellow search service as the results come in live from the Yellow servers. I found a perfect example in 5 minutes of playing with the app. One of the baked in favourite searches (a nice feature) is ‘Taxi’. But the results include Tax Accountants and even the New Zealand Men’s Clinic which services erectile dysfunction in “labourers, lawyers, doctors and taxi drivers”.

Luckily for Yellow such problems should be easily fixed, they have all the data which is the biggest hurdle. All they need to do now is fix search (or give it up to Google), ditch the paper publication, chop their workforce and open up their data. Welcome to Yellow 2.0, don’t hold your breath…

July 2009 on Zenbu

2928 edits from 126 users on Zenbu in July. The biggest editors were

zenbu	1608
TeamHunterGatherer	624
psychochicken	124
SteveA	92
burgla	53
tepuna	34
jfactor	27
brownees172	27
jonzee	27
Gremlin	26
MauriceWinn	24
vrod_rider	22
skycity	21
garyt	13
Linzi	12
paul111	8
Spiker	8
mightyman	8

An exciting development which I hinted at last month was the addition of almost every car dealer in the country by TeamHunterGatherer from http://autotrader.co.nz/. Thanks very much Autotrader! It’s wonderful to hear from people who ‘get’ the Zenbu concept and see that we can all be better off by sharing.

psychochicken added the petrol brand names, such as Synergy or Ultimate, to petrol stations around the country. Petrol stations do push that brand on their signs so it makes sense for it to be in Zenbu too although I’d love to know how people are using that as I’m not sure myself!

SteveA did a lot of work on all the Speed Cameras which are listed in Zenbu. I understand these are exported and used in the nzopengps.org Garmin map project to provide custom alerts for GPS users. Very nifty, very cool.

tepuna is a new member who went to town on their local area Te Puna / Bethlehem / Omokoroa (just north of Tauranga). I love to see people get involved and add/edit lots of content in their locality. It makes Zenbu useful for them and everyone else who goes looking for things in the area. Nice one!

Actually a whole bunch of big editors last month so apologies for not hat tipping everybody but thank you to each and every one of you. Cheers!

Mature or Suggestive Themes

Apple has recently added a rating system to the iTunes appStore based on a variety of themes

• Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
• Realistic Violence
• Sexual Content or Nudity
• Profanity or Crude Humor
• Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
• Mature/Suggestive Themes
• Simulated Gambling
• Horror/Fear Themes
• Prolonged graphic or sadistic realistic violence
• Graphic sexual content and nudity

I rated the Zenbu app None for all the above, getting a 4+ rating, but our most recent update was rejected (after 3 long weeks in review) because it

allows unfiltered access to contents of the Zenbu website, where content with mature or suggestive themes can be accessed

There is the occasional adult shop, gentlemen’s club, brothel (80% of them in Napier, that’s wierd…) or massage parlour on Zenbu but if it’s OK in the eyes of the law, it’s OK with us.  (Zenbu is not a classifieds service so we don’t have that kind of information)

I hadn’t thought of the possibility of a 5 year old doing a local search for such objectionable material and getting hold of the local strippies phone number and then… what Apple?

Now we get a 9+ rating for infrequent Mature / Suggestive Themes. Those 10 year olds are so mature.

TechCrunch says the rating system is broken, I tend to agree.

Echronomy 101

Echronomy (noun) : the production, distribution and consumption of time. [a neologism from economy and chronos – the Greek word for time)

I’ve watched the Free debate between Internet poster-boys Malcolm Gladwell versus Chris Anderson with interest, it’s a fascinating discussion in a period of such monumental change. The topic is worthy of the many books about it so this 1000 word summary simply relates the concepts back to Zenbu.

Anderson, who wrote the book and coined the term “The Long Tail” and is currently promoting his new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”, pushes the idea that information industries will tend towards providing a free product based on age old Adam Smith economics that the price will be the marginal cost of production, which is close enough to zero for anything which can be consumed as zeros and ones.

Gladwell, author of Tipping Point and Blink and a journalist at The New Yorker, seems to take umbrage that his newspaper industry is a key target in Anderson’s writing.

Gladwell writes

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money)

Answering each point in turn:

1. digital infrastructure is effectively Free
The inherent nature of the internet is a distributed infrastructure which spreads the cost of use out between users – not free but close enough. BitTorrent is such a succesful distribution system because it utilises that very distributed nature.

2. consumers love Free
Beyond that, free is the black hole of rational consumer thought.

3. Free means never having to make a judgment
Free does NOT mean never having to make a judgement, it means we have to judge things without price based on our most precious, divisible and scarce resource – time (or attention). In fact if time was a transferrable asset, it would be the perfect monetary system; I call this the Echronomy but I digress into Sci Fi territory.

4. the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money
The market created by these claims can and will make a lot of money! Freemium, not free, is the actual model promoted by Anderson (he screams for the thousandth time in his blog comments); Google brought in 5.7 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2008 based on this freemium model, unarguably a lot of money. Best guesses are over 90% of this is from advertising so this isn’t ‘new money’ (yet), its simply a transfer of wealth from the old (and in terminal decline) media industries. The pie is shrinking because the internet enables extremes of efficiency impossible in old media, so businesses are spending less and getting more, but at some stage they will realise that if they spent the same (or more) than they did previously in old media they will get orders of magnitude more value; the pie will grow again.

The most galling part of Gladwell’s argument is that he picks out Anderson’s use of YouTube as an example and admission that YouTube “has so far failed to make any money for Google.” Who cares? It’s an investment! I’m sure there’s a very simple graph of YouTube revenues. Revenue trends upwards relentlessly from advertising (and other) income streams. (YouTubes media advertising techniques might be experimental but there is a century of proof that this market is sound. ) Meanwhile the costs, mainly bandwidth and storage, shrink exponentially each year. The two lines will, sooner or later, cross and never go back.

Perhaps these golden years of the internet are parallel to the land grab of the wild west, only now the land up for grabs is the far more transient concept of attention – and Google is staking out some serious ground. Every day information becomes more abundant and attention more scarce; we enter the Attention Economy.
Of course Gladwell is right that not everything will be free, we will always be willing to pay for convenience, quality and exclusiveness. Anderson is also right that information resources will inevitably tend towards free. It’s economics 101: cost of entry to the information market and the marginal cost of distribution are both close to zero.

(What does this all have to do with Zenbu?!) The Yellow Pages in New Zealand was a $300 million a year business in 2008 and I believe this is one pie in serious need of shrinking. Yellow has a strong aura of authority and authenticity. We can rely on Yellow to have a listing for every business – primarily due to the strong historical relationships from when Telecom had a monopoly on telephone lines. Yellow did a great job of compiling and distributing information about every business in NZ. In the days before the internet this was a mammoth task, deserving of the massive infrastructure that Yellow has built.

Today it is a different story. We can build and share a comparable superior directory using the infrastructure of the net and the distributed labour force of the end users. We don’t need 200 staff or $10K full page ads in a printed paperweight pushed out to every household when we can create a better information resource with 2000 contributors and a few servers. I don’t begrudge those 200 people their jobs but New Zealand would be far more productive if they were doing something else of value. (Actually a lot of those jobs are outsourced to the Philippines now but that’s a completely different issue)

The Yellow pie will naturally shrink from old-media-attrition but let’s hurry it up, let’s build Zenbu up so you can Find Everything. The pie needs to be shrunk, it’s dinnertime.

June 2009 on Zenbu

2496 edits from 115 users on Zenbu in June. The biggest editors were

zenbu 1537
Gremlin 336
Spiker 183
SteveA 95
brownees172 44
jonzee 43
MauriceWinn 32
Linzi 12
rodo 12
jimboeri 11
burgla 10
allsecure 8
paulcar2006 7
EveMH 7
ronk 6
Falk 6
toddenergy 6
rentrite 5
FantomFan 5
giftsofnz 5

SteveA went to town adding Railway Stations up and down the country which is awesome and Spiker added almost every gun club in the country along with a tonne of edits around Whakatane, Edgecumbe.

Gremlin finished off a 6 month project to make sure that every 24hr petrol station in the country had that entered in the Hours  field; this is extremely valuable information to know when you’re on the go! Gremlin is a prominent supporter of the NZ Open GPS Garmin maps project, which all the Zenbu POIs are regularly exported to (free under the Zenbu CC license), and now all the 24hr petrol stations have 24HR in the POI label thanks to him. Nice work!

Zenbu loaded every Pharmacy in the country from data supplied by the Ministry of Health, over 900 pharmacies nationwide. Rad. One step closer to Finding Everything on Zenbu.

Jumping the gun a little as this isn’t live yet, but we’ve supplied a massive list of nationwide car dealers by someone in the industry. There’s still some work to do on tidying it up for consumption but that will be another exciting boost to the database in July.

Thanks for all the support from editors and users alike. Cheers!

Zenbu iPhone App Advertising $1 Auction June 2009

We’re conducting a small experiment.

The Zenbu iPhone app is currently getting over 1300 update downloads with each monthly release but the app is completely offline so we don’t get the kind of thorough reporting that we’re used to online. We’d like to know how much others value it so we’re putting it on the open market. We’ve added a small unobtrusive banner ad to each search result page and that space is up for rent.

If you’re interested in providing a targeted, compelling offer to Kiwi iPhone users please check out our $1 no reserve Trademe auction. If there’s sufficient demand, and favourable user feedback, we may continue or extend the concept in future.

As always we look forward to your input. Let the experiment begin!