MapQuest Back on Top

According to the Hitwise Travel Report, MapQuest leads Google Maps in travel category visits:

Based on previous reports from both comScore and Hitwise, I had written that Google Maps had passed MapQuest. So I asked Hitwise how that was reconciled with the chart above. Here’s the response I received:

When we reported that Google Maps passed MapQuest it was based on weekly data. The chart below shows that Google Maps passed them back in April for one week and again last week. Based on monthly data, which that Travel report uses from our Travel Category, MapQuest is still ahead but not by much.

Here Comes Yellowspaces

Gib Olander has been tweeting about Yellowspaces for the past 48 hours but the official release just came out this morning. I wrote briefly about the new local search engine at SEL.

To look at Yellowspaces is to see a site that has a couple of nifty features but is not going to strike people immediately as anything new or different. Although one interesting angle is that Yellowspaces is playing up its relationship with Localeze and using its Confidence Scoring as part of the Yellowspaces algorithm.

So I sent a number of questions about what makes the site different and whether Localeze has any stake in Yellowspaces to the company to get some additional insight. (One thing I neglected to ask about was reviews, which are not present on the site.) Founder Constantin Manta, who is an accountant by day, entrepreneur by night, provided the answers below. According to his PR firm, he “came into the local search business as most of his clientele are small business owners trying to make a name for themselves/advertise their business and struggling with traditional Yellow Pages and even many of the local search engines.”

Here are Manta’s thoughts and verbatim responses to my questions:

Localeze is the primary data source of the YS business listings. The Confidence Score adds an extra layer of relevance to our YellowRank™ relevancy algorithm. Our YellowRank score tells you how well we think this business matches your search. We give it a higher rank the closer it is to you, so this number is dynamic, it will change based on where field (point 4). If a business seems to really represent what you’re looking for it will score highly. Best matches will be both accurate and close!

Localeze has no financial interest [in Yellowspaces]

YellowSpaces was NOT primarily designed to be found by Google/other major search engines (although we have SEO). To me this is important. The local search community is currently focused on SEO because they don’t take themselves seriously as search engines. They actually believe that the natural entry point to their search engines is another search engine. They have no faith that people will automatically go to them when looking for local data. We are confident enough to think that we will be able to improve on the Localeze data over time to be one of the top places to come for local searches.

Our location “where” field can be populated with:
- Zip code: 10001
- City, State: Howard Beach, NY
- Neighborhood: Upper West Side (New York NY)
- County: Lee County (Lee FL)
- Landmark: Yankee Doodle Lake (Boulder CO) / Giants Stadium (Bergen NJ)

We have BOTH a structured category system (see the browse link in the footer) and free text search. The free text search are tags (keywords) that business owners can place into their business listing and/or are service keywords and brands from the Localeze data set. Our tags are called: YellowTags™

Website Strengths:
User-friendly and clean design.
Provides information quickly.
Designed to support additional business content (images, video etc)
Although YellowSpaces is currently ad-supported, everything you need about a business is easily found.
Mobile version (coming soon for the iPhone)

Perhaps most interesting among Manta’s responses is this one:

YellowSpaces was NOT primarily designed to be found by Google/other major search engines (although we have SEO). To me this is important. The local search community is currently focused on SEO because they don’t take themselves seriously as search engines. They actually believe that the natural entry point to their search engines is another search engine. They have no faith that people will automatically go to them when looking for local data. We are confident enough to think that we will be able to improve on the Localeze data over time to be one of the top places to come for local searches.

This is a gutsy position to take and in some sense correct — you have to build a “branded” destination experience to survive long term. What to you folks think about this attitude and/or Yellowspaces in general?

Yelp a Successor to Newspapers?

Slate’s “Big Money” site (owned by the Washington Post) features an article on Yelp arguing it represents the successor to newspaper advertising in many respects:

[W]hile the online presentation of news has made tremendous leaps, ingenuity has not carried over to the business side. Online readers see (and ignore) the same lame online display ads they did 10 years ago, just more of them, and bigger. And the most expensive online advertising now actively blocks readers from viewing any content until the ad has fully played. This is progress?

The truth is, there has been progress in monetizing the Internet, beyond the display ads most people ignore. But that progress isn’t coming from newspaper companies. It’s coming from companies like Yelp. And Yelp is currently eating newspapers’ lunch . . .

Yelp’s founders have invented a Web site that cleaves local online advertising from journalism, right when journalism needs it most. Yelp is the evolution and replacement for the actually quite useful local advertising that used to appear in newspapers, only without the pesky journalism breaking up the ad pages. And Yelp is trying to make that separation permanent.

There’s something quite awkward and even strange about the angle the writer takes here: Yelp is contributing to the demise of newspapers. Yes, newspapers have not been as innovative as they could have been online. And, yes, Yelp has probably attracted some restaurant and other local ad dollars that at one time would have gone to newspapers. But Yelp is part of a much larger category of online advertising options for small business that collectively are drawing traditional media dollars to the Internet.

Yelp’s monetization efforts are not really novel (it uses display ads and sponsored listings) and the company has challenges on that side of the business, despite huge success with consumers.

To the extent that the author is arguing: newspapers should have created a local community site like Yelp . . . OK, sure. But what about Metromix?

Aboonda Brings New Twists to Local

Maybe because it’s late or maybe because there are quite a few “moving parts,” it took me a little while to get Aboonda. The new service, in limited availability in a few California cities, brings together a range of interesting elements that are relatively new or untested in local. Accordingly, the company is offering a CPA model to local businesses. In this case the “A” is actual purchases. More provocatively it’s effectively paying for word of mouth to promote its roster of local merchants.

The company makes money in a couple of ways:

• From individuals who become “distributors” (think Amway) and pay a monthly fee ($85)
• From local merchants when purchases are actually made

Remarkably, and perhaps foolishly, the company is guaranteeing consumers will make at least $50K in purchases at participating restaurants and stores over the next year (with the qualifier that not all “vendors” can qualify for the guarantee). Tracking is provided through the purchase method itself: text/SMS message.

When consumers make purchases local businesses pay a fee/commission to Aboonda. Consumers are “bribed” to make referrals to friends and family to generate income for themselves. According to collateral on the site, here’s how it works for consumers (quoting verbatim):

• Aboonda “bribes” you to use the service for the first time by paying for your lunch at a participating restaurant.
• Then Aboonda’s customer service calls you to see how things went, bribes you some more, and supplies you with 50 referral cards to give to friends and family.
• As your referrals make purchases you immediately begin to earn money in your Aboonda account … $200, $500 and more per month.

The people who become distributors (called Aboonda Ambassadors) spread the word through their networks and try to recruit other would-be ambassadors. According to the inaugural entry on the Aboonda blog:

We’ve developed a referral marketing model that empowers consumers to make some extra income as they steer their social networks to Aboonda’s participating vendors – local retailers, restaurants and service providers – who enjoy increased top-line sales, free promotion, and new profit centers . . .

Aboonda makes a commission when its users purchase with Aboonda’s Buy-By-Mobile technology at local retailers and restaurants.  It is therefore Aboonda’s job to get its users to spend as much as possible at its participating local vendors.

Abooda was founded by Frank Turner, formerly of AT&T yellow pages. This is one of those ideas that really looks good “on paper” but may be very hard to execute in practice. The challenges as I see them are:

• Getting the ambassadors involved
• Getting people to make these local buys via SMS (not an insurmountable obstacle but represents behavioral change to a degree)
• Selling the service to local businesses (the guarantee, designed to generate sign-ups may actually generate sketpicism as being “too good to be true”)

In fairness I haven’t spoken to Turner so I don’t know anything more about Aboonda than what’s on its site. Take a look and tell me what you think.

MetaCarta Providing Local News to Vine

MetaCarta is providing local news to the recently announced Microsoft Vine:

MetaCarta, Inc., the leading provider of geographic search solutions, today announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to provide the MetaCarta Geographic Search and Referencing Platform to deliver map-based local news within the Microsoft Vine service. Microsoft Vine connects individuals to the people and places they care about most, when it matters. It helps people stay in touch with family and friends and enables them to send alerts when someone needs help. With the Microsoft Vine personal dashboard, people can get involved by creating groups, then sending them alerts and reports to stay in touch, informed and involved.

Among other things, MetaCarta takes unstructured data and associates it with a location. The technology behind its GeoSearch News site is what’s being used by Microsoft.

I’m still waiting to get access so I haven’t been able to use Vine. But there’s something very interesting here. Note the language used in the text of the release quoted above: “Microsoft Vine connects individuals to the people and places they care about most, when it matters.”

To me this implies broader long-term ambitions for Vine than just emergency communications.

How to Save Print Publications

Technology Review editor and publisher Jason Pontin writes at length – “a manifesto” — about the predicament of print publications and how to save the industries they represent. He also responds to and critiques some of the prevailing “it doesn’t matter if print fails, blogs and others will pick up the slack” arguments. 

The basic ideas and superficial summary are as follows: charge readers regardless of platform, align price and value on the ads front and reduce headcount to bring costs in line with revenues. These in many ways are common sense recommendations. The devil is in execution. 

His piece is very dense and worthy of deeper thought than this but I wanted to alert people who may be interested.

___

Related: 

• AdAdge: Newspapers Build Digital Portfolios
• The Sun Sets on BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune
• Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press

Latitude Starts to Expand to Other Apps

Google is now expanding its map-based, location-aware service Latitude beyond the the Latitude destination in new ways with a public location sharing badge for third party sites and other apps that incorporate location. The first of those is Google Talk.

The rest of this post is at SEL.

UpNext Releases 3D iPhone App

UpNext has brought its 3D cityguide and community site to the iPhone. It covers Manhattan only today but it’s a very nice app featuring 3D rendering of buildings. It also offers the full range of local search data including business details, ratings and community notes. It also includes transit information, which is very useful in NYC. And of course it taps into GPS and triangulation to locate users.

People can rate businesses directly from the app as well as upload photos at listings/venue-level pages. It’s visually very impressive and probably more useful in some respects than the company’s online site. While Google Earth and Live Search Maps offer comparable 3D imagery online they don’t in mobile. However, Google Street View and Panoramio photos are available on the iPhone. More street level and venue images would definitely enhance the UpNext app.

Users can search on the UpNext app by category and keyword and move quickly through locations highlighted on the map. It also offers what the company calls “tap search.” By tapping a building you can see a list of the businesses located inside. The operation (at least on WiFi) is very smooth. Since it’s all about the visuals, here’s a video demo.

Right now it costs $2.99 based on user feedback UpNext received during the beta trial. That price point is higher than most comparable apps in the local space. But the company needs revenue. UpNext is also looking for additional monetization options so contact them if you want your ads on their site.

Twitter Poll Responses

Here’s the breakdown so far:

This is very “unscientific” but interesting. The “personal use” category is too vague but I wanted to distinguish it from brand tracking and marketing or customer service.

As Will Scott suggested to me in a tweet/response I probably should have included a category that allowed for multiple reasons and “networking.” If you haven’t taken it and want to, go here (you have to sign in to LinkedIn unfortunately).

Twitter Use Cases Poll

Over at LinkedIn I’ve asked:

Take the poll here: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/36072/nvgfx

Borrell Offers New Figures for Local Sites

Borrell Associates has always been the most bullish among the firms forecasting and tracking local ad revenues. Their firm’s new report on what “local websites earn” is out. Here’s the chart breaking down what Borrell says is a $12.6 billion local online ad market:

Source: Borrell Associates

If we take just the directory and newspaper categories, here’s what the percentages translate into:

• Directories: $1.32 billion
• Newspapers: $3.2 billion

For 2008, according to the NAA, online newspaper revenues were $3.1 billion. These numbers likely include bundling and are probably not “pure” online advertising.

Per the IAB, full year 2008 online ad revenues were $23 billion. Borrell’s overall number, $12.6 billion, is just over 50% of the IAB’s overall online ad revenue figure. That seems quite high to me. However the directory and newspaper figures above are pretty accurate. I’m not sure if verticals are included in Borrell’s “directories” category however.

Survey: 86% of WOM Recs Are Local

A survey of 315 consumers by Buzfactor found some things about consumer word of mouth that make lots of intuitive sense. Here are the bullets:

• A recommendation is 15X more influential than advertising “on where consumers shop and dine”
• 71.2% of respondents were “likely” or “very likely” to try a restaurant based on a recommendation
• 86% of respondents said the businesses they most often recommend are local

Source: Buzfactor

Using a calculation based on the survey findings Buzfactor determined that “each customer evangelist a business has potentially generates 19 new customers for their business.”

Here’s related data from the Allbusiness-Opus Research SMB survey (8/08) regarding the perception of WOM influence:

Source: Opus Research, AllBusiness.com, August, 2008, n=1071 US SMBs

The point of the above slide, to reinforce the Buzfactor data, is that most small businesses see at least half of their customers coming from word of mouth (in their self-reported perception).

Apple and Twitter in Slick Reciprocal PR

This is pretty interesting: Apple promoting the use of Macs at Twitter. It’s also a slick commercial/promotion for Twitter as well:

I know what you’re saying, “enough about Twitter already.” I realize I’m becoming like the alcoholic who becomes a born again Christian and can’t stop talking about Jesus.