Emad Fanous

So it seems WhatsOpen has finally launched.

It’s a site where users can search for what’s open. Type in your location and what you’re looking for (i.e. a coffee shop) and get search results of what’s currently open.

It’s a perfect fit for a mobile application.

Adena Schutzberg notes the following:

The writer at Local Tech Wire (WRAL - Raleigh/Durham, NC) notes it looks pretty good for his known orbit of coffee shops, but points out his favorite mexican places don’t show up in searches for burritos. I searched for “coffee” in “modesto” and learned about the Coffee Family Dental. Also annoying: hours do not seem to be day of the week dependent. I bet that dentist’s office is not open on Sunday, for example.

The site shows hours on the left without any mention of the day of the week. It’s entirely possible that they do factor day of the week in but only display the hours for “today” in order to save space in their UI. However, when I searched for coffee shops near my house, I got results for what appears to be all coffee shops in my area. I searched at 8:30 am and got business that weren’t opening until 10am or later (according to their left nav results).

I love the concept for mobile devices. As a matter of fact, we have been working on this for a while now at YellowBot. We’re currently building and testing internally but we have exposed part of it for more user feedback. You can go to the iPhone YellowBot site and start checking results where, next to the hours, you’ll be told if the business is opened, closed, opening soon, etc…and, it is day of the week dependent.

We’ll be releasing the “search by what is currently open” functionality shortly (and are debating whether to default to this behavior on mobile devices) hopefully soon if we don’t reprioritize based on upcoming projects.

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I’ll be seeing some of the regular readers of this blog at The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media 2007 conference, which, for the first year, will be 1) in association with Search Engine Strategies Local and 2) in Los Angeles.

I’ll be a speaker on the Convergence of Local Media and Directories panel.

If you’re going, send me an email so we can meet up!

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 

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The LA tech community has been working on putting together various events such as Twiistup and Lunch 2.0.

Today, YellowBot is hosting Lunch 2.0.

Vani & Ask, after getting the idea from Erik and Chad, started a new blog to talk specifically about Los Angeles tech events.

I also created a public Google Calendar that you can subscribe to in order to track these events and have added all for them as publishers to that calendar:

(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 

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Techcrunch points out Earthmine, a sort of Google Streetview but with tagging, higher resolution photos, and more details.

[I]magine you’re a restaurant owner who wants to entice potential customers by tagging the outside of your diner within a 3D panorama with menu information and digital coupons.
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What this all means is that Earthmine’s system can keep track of the objects found in the real world and attribute information to each of them (a process known as “asset mapping�).

There seems to be a growing number of companies in this arena. I’ve emailed/talked briefly with Danny Moon of UpNext, Jeff Brandes of Everyscape, and others. I really like what these sites are doing and what they are planning to do. More to come when I can talk about it some more.

The interface definitely has a coolness factor. However, finding the information you are looking for still needs some work. I imagine some sort of combination between traditional local search and these 3D immersive technologies may lead to a useful product…so it was no suprise to me when Google came out with their Street View product (and what also fuels the speculation that they could build a Second Life competitor). Blending online and offline will lead to a better product. Whether you sue this immersive map, mobile phones with GPS integrated with maps, or even QR Codes that you can take a picture of with your mobile phone and be automatically taken to an appropriate website, menu (if it is a restaurant), or map (for example).

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 

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Yahoo has announced that they have added and improved their one box (a “box” at the top with some quick answers to search queries):

Whatever it is you want to do: research a topic, find a website, plan a vacation, research a medical condition, view a funny video, or any of the other billions of queries we get from users — their intents expressed via a few keywords in a search box.

Search Engine Journal notes that this has been applied to Local results but seems to be heavily weighted towards hotels & restaurants which are often the top categories searched for (and reviewed, and …).

The most influential and useful Yahoo Shortcuts seem to revolve around the travel and hospitality industries in terms of Hotels and Restaurants. These Shortcuts emphasize the user generated content, the true power of the Yahoo Network’s Local Search, in user reviews and ratings.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 

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Immersive Media announced that their deal with Google for StreetView has terminated. Once can only speculate on who terminated and why or why Google decided not to acquire them. Google has had their fleet of StreetView cars spotted on their lot and IM says they’ve sent them out. They’ve been doing their own collecting while simultaneously using IM for a while now.

Why would Google build its own fleet to begin with? The press release mentions that their content licensing deal has ended. If Google was licensing the technology, they could own the content but the press release indicates they are licensing the content so IM would own those photos. Could this mean that the licensing terms were too restrictive? When I was a SES in San Jose this year, I went to the Google Dance on the Google Campus and the engineer working on the StreetView project (he was in charge of the pictures, not the programming) said they were planning to bring those photos into the API so people could use them for their mashups. I already have noticed that a lot of features and data that exist on their site are not in the API because of other licensing issues. Could this have been one of the issues? Or is it that Google wanted to ramp up quickly and do this in such a large volume that IM could not handle that sort of demand in a short period of time…so Google would build its own fleet and, once completed and large enough, they would not need IM anymore? Well, we won’t know for sure until someone says more.

Meanwhile, at SMX Local & Mobile, Michael Jones, Chief Technologist for Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Local gave a keynote where he speaks a bit about the future direction of their products and the industry. Some take-aways include:

• Google strives to be a local searcher’s concierge (as in a concierge that helps you at a hotel or elsewhere)
• Theirs other data out there that must be mapped into local (the ones he mentions such as traffic, reviews, etc are no-brainers and they’re already happening…what is up Google’s sleeve??) and using all that info to “geographically organize the world’s information”
• Google knows they have a lot of work to do to improve their product
• Crowdsourcing is a way to collect info and improve data (perhaps a way to internalize the risk of external contracts)

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
 

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Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer has been working on trying to acquire Navteq for along time now but there are now published reports that both sides have agreed on terms.

Nokia said in August it will assemble all its Internet services under the “Ovi” brand, which means “door” in Finnish. Ovi will include Nokia Music Store, N-Gage games and Nokia Maps, and more Internet services will be added.
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Nokia’s music store, coupled with devices that can download songs directly from the service, will make the Finnish company a competitor to Apple Inc.’s iTunes.
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Last month Nokia agreed to buy Boston-based marketing company Enpocket to add technology for placing advertisements through text messages and e-mail. The mobile advertising market is dominated by Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. Global sales are estimated to rise to $11.4 billion by 2011 from $2.17 billion currently, according to Informa Telecoms & Media Group.
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One of the new units will be called services and software as the company aims to capture more revenue outside traditional handset and network sales.

Sounds like a play to become a more services-oriented company and rely less on phone hardware sales for revenue. They will sell services and possibly provide content and monetize it with ads. With maps, a music store, and more around the corner, it seems possible that they would go after the iPhone knowing very well it would increase sales of their phones (not to mention concern over maintaining their own marketshare with the iPhone going international and rumors of Google’s GPhone popping up regularly).

What does this mean to new competitors?

…here’s the rub: Garmin last quarter was one of two 10% customers of Navteq; the other was BMW. If Nokia, through its phones, becomes a competitor to Garmin, does Garmin shift to a Navteq competitior (not good for Nokia) or does Garmin team up with Nokia/Navteq to somehow capitalize on the cell phone/navigation phenomenon?

Nokia claims it will continue to support the Navteq customers…but for how long?

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 

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There have been Lunch 2.0 meetings all over the place. Last month, This Next helped host it (with the help of Andrew Warner) in Santa Monica…the first time it was in Los Angeles (finally)!

YellowBot will be hosting Lunch 2.0 next in Burbank. If you’re in LA and can make it, make sure to RSVP. Otherwise, make sure to spread the word (send emails, blog about it, etc).

More information about Lunch 2.0 here.

(5 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 

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If you have an iPhone and haven’t done so already, make sure to:

• get your store credit; and
• download AppTapp

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The Washington Post has an article on online reputation management which describes using SEO techniques to push bad content down in the search results.

Forbes had a similar article a while back.

Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don’t promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.

They also explain how these companies continue to collect “from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month” and can continue to collect ongoing revenue based on this business model:

Still, Google is continually refining its search methods, which means that today’s fix may not work tomorrow.

Some of the sample techniques described included creating MySpace pages, Youtube accounts, custom websites with good SEO-freidnly domain names using multiple different TLDs, creating backlinks to these different sites, or asking the person who had written something negative to take it down.

Google’s response to doing some of these techniques was “if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it.”

Interested to see how much these comapnies are charging in addition to the recurring fees?

So Fertik’s team, which works from a Silicon Valley office, offered VanderPal its premium service, using various techniques to promote VanderPal’s own site and suppress the blogs. That service now starts at $10,000.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 

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