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!

May 2009 on Zenbu

1332 edits from 123 users in May on Zenbu.  The biggest editors were

 zenbu 999
Gremlin 69
simonpt 16
MauriceWinn 15
brownees172 14
vrod_rider 10
dave 10
WhollyBagels 10
FantomFan 9
rodo 8
Darryls_Dinner_Cruise 6
hoogy 6
paulcar2006 5
matt 5
whchua 5
Yannick 5
308gtb 5
burgla 5

The Waikato District Council finally came to the party providing their database of food premises, hairdressers & funeral directors (something for everybody there). Turns out the 6 month delay was because the enquiry email address published on their website went to….nobody!! I guess the council is back from their summer at Raglan and finally updated the website. Thanks guys! This one has bugged me for a while, it was a big whole in the system quite noticeable to me every time I drove up or down through the Waikato. Now we’re that much closer to finding everything in Ngaruawahia, Maramarua, Huntly, Taupiri or Raglan.

We’ve topped 70,000 listings on Zenbu and 25,000 Kiwi’s using the website each week, with untold more thousands using the various Zenbu mobile applications. It’s exciting to see Zenbu grow and more and more people get on board. Thanks for being involved.

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!

Orphan Directories

 

Unloved Bedraggled Yellow Pages

I saw this sad sight on Friday morning. One month after delivery the directories lie unwanted on the street, a visual blight on an otherwise clean leafy street. Won’t somebody take pity on them and at least chuck them in a recycling bin?

I hear more and more anecdotal evidence of people chopping their Yellow Pages advertising spend completely. On the other hand a 30 something medical professional told me last week he actually used the physical directory frequently. I was somewhat amazed until he explained that he didn’t have access to a computer; if he did have a computer he would have Googled it. This is surely an ever-growing trend. As internet access and electronic information becomes more ubiquitous (such as the Zenbu app on your iPhone or Windows Mobile) the utility of these paper directories will plummet. Expect to see more and more orphans on our streets in the years to come.

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!