YouTube has added a location search capability:
I wrote about it in some detail on Search Engine Land.
You’ve been able to search Google Earth (and Maps) for video for some time, but this instantly makes YouTube a more “practical” tool for travelers among others. However it’s not a good tool for local business video search, notwithstanding this new tool.
Here’s my suggestion regarding a local “Video Pages” on YouTube.
At a dinner with friends on Thursday night a couple of people were arguing about the relationship and distance between two towns in Israel (Haifa and Sefat). I pulled out my laptop and went to Google Maps to settle the dispute. But here’s what showed up:
I then when to Live Maps and found this:
And with this level of detail we were able to settle the argument:
I knew there had been security issues and concerns about mapping Israel, but I was surprised to see basic geographic detail missing on Google Maps.
Go ahead, sing it. 
Google Blogoscoped posted yesterday about Google’s StreetView coming to the Tour de France route:
This is just the first release of imagery. But Google is collecting photos for all the major capitals of Europe and elsewhere. StreetView will eventually be a great tool for tourism and travel as more imagery is released. It already is for Europeans coming to the US.
Ask.com, in a new period of cost cutting and belt tightening, has ditched its home-grown mapping product on Ask City and outsourced that function to Microsoft’s able Virtual Earth platform. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has more details.
Former Ask CEO Jim Lanzone was very proud of the Ask City product, which, with its three panel approach, was something of a model for Ask’s highly innovative “3D” design. But key people have left the Ask team (e.g., Ryan Massie) and so it makes logical sense that much of the service would be outsourced at this point.
Here’s a nice post from Brady Forrest on Walkscore, which rates individual neighborhoods according to — you guessed it — a walkability score. It’s an interesting site for tourists and travelers and, to some degree, homebuyers and renters. As more data are added, it will become more useful over time.
The neighborhoods data comes from Zillow.
Microsoft is soliciting states and municipalities’ photography for inclusion in Virtual Earth:
We’re just starting a new program called “GoVE” which enables municipalities, state and local governments, aerial photographers, carrier pigeons, whoever, to share your imagery with Microsoft for publishing onto Virtual Earth the platform that powers thousands of enterprise applications, not to mention our own Live Search Maps.
Now your imagery can be part of the Virtual Earth we’re creating. Join in the world changing event that is Microsoft Virtual Earth.
User imagery can’t be far behind. Today in Virtual Earth users can create collections or lists of favorites and annotate them. But I don’t believe that they can add images. However images can be added to My Maps and Google Earth and all those files are supported by Virtual Earth and discoverable in Live Search Maps.
The idea behind pay per call and directory assistance substitutes like 800-Free-411 is that the telephone is a natural interface and delivery mechanism for leads and contacts to small businesses. VoiceStar (now part of Marchex) and others have also sought to capture text online and deliver it to a merchant handset for the same reason: to bridge the worlds of conventional business practices and the Internet.
Last week I spoke with Sanjeev Agrawal of TheStoreBook, which is seeking to do something similar. TheStoreBook uses telephone IVR as self-service input mechanism to acquire advertising and small business content (see video below).
There are a range of intriguing possibilities for this capability (think enhanced profiles on local sites). However TheStoreBook has launched as a way to obtain coupons and deals content, which is entered verbally over the phone. That content is then translated into text (by humans offshore) and distributed to various sites, like Google Maps and points beyond.
Here’s an example:
The turnaround time can be a few hours or less. So a business could call in a promotion and have that “special” distributed before lunchtime. Alternatively an SMB might have excess “inventory” of some sort (shoes of a certain size or make) and create a promotion that might last until they were sold out.
Another interesting angle here is how the content is solicited. Agrawal knows the challenges of “self-service” for this market. And this is a self-service system obviously. But the solicitation of deals can be generated by automated calling. In other words, a StoreBook registered advertiser (e.g., restaurant) could be conditioned by a scheduled, incoming telephone call in the morning to provide a lunch special on a daily basis. The system has the capacity to reach out to advertisers on an automated basis.
Here’s a demo:
Agrawal is aware of the sales and distribution challenges here. He’s also not the first to try and leverage the phone for promotions; NearbyNow does something similar in a more limited capacity. But he has built a system that could become a valuable tool for near real-time promotional information capture and distribution. He’s also built the beginnings of a system for SMB content acquisition that has broad implications and extends well beyond coupons.
The move to “hyper-local” is picking up steam with companies like Outside.in announcing Radar and Google’s new Map Maker, not to mention diversification of geotargeting technologies (see Skyhook Wireless) and a growing range of local-mobile applications that offer very precise location capabilities.
Neighborhood data and databases are also becoming an important part of online local and mapping applications. Yahoo is the latest to add neighborhood information (from Urban Mapping):
Yahoo! has licensed Urbanware: Neighborhoods, Urban Mapping’s database product of more than 40,000 neighborhood boundaries covering more than 2,000 U.S. cities and towns.
Having this level of data will become important to all mapping and local sites. Maponics and Zillow also provide zip or neighborhood level data.
Urban Mapping also offers an add-targeting product (”geomods”), which is ahead of where the market is today. While consumers value this kind of location and local information, advertisers don’t really know how to effectively utilize it yet.
Disney World in Orlando is now available in 3D in Google Earth. Here’s how you can get access to it.
This is the future of online travel planning pure and simple: much more visually rich information about a place presented to the end user to explore. And think about this on the “big screen” in the living room, which is where this will eventually wind up.
Canada’s Yellow Pages Group has announced a deal with AgendiZe to install the latter’s Universal Contact Widgets across all its business listings. According to the release put out today:
Yellow Pages Group will feature free AgendiZe Universal Contact Widgets on all of their online business directory listing pages in Canada. Contact Widgets are pre-configured and automatically updated to contain each business’ contact and product or service information, and enable consumers to conveniently save and share that information across more than 70 social networking, chat, social bookmarking, address books, desktop, PDA and email services.
Here’s my previous post about how it works. The deal has been in place (also one with Yellow Book) since September, 2007.
Yellow Pages Group also recently introduced a Facebook application:
By my count that makes it: Superpages, Citysearch, Yell and now YellowPages.ca on Facebook.
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AgendiZe founder and CEO Alexandre Rambaud said in an email to me that this was an update and evolution of what was being done previously: “What YPG now offers is the possibility for any of its 420,000 business listings/advertisers to directly ‘copy and paste’ the AgendiZe ‘call to action’ tools into their own web site or blog. All this for free …”
AgendiZe also extends its social tools to SMB websites as well, through a “universal contact widget.”
It makes sense of directory publishers to take advantage of these capabilities because they add utility and convenience for the user and offer “viral” distribution possibilities for both the publishers and their advertisers.
Local Matters announced that it has acquired Point2’s Facebook Neighborhoods application:
Point2 launched Neighborhoods for Facebook in July 2007. To date, 800,000 Facebook users have installed the application. Facebook boasts over 70 million active users and is the 6th most trafficked website in the world today, according to comScore.
There’s an ongoing relationship to maintain the application. Local Matters’ CEO Perry Evans also riffs on the acquisition and the value and importance of neighborhoods in a blog post:
The context of this post was, in part, to help explain the thinking behind an important development partnership that we just announced at Local Matters. We’ve taken over the ownership and development of the Facebook Neighborhoods application, which was developed by Point2 Technologies (a leading real estate technology company) to syndicate local home listings to FB users.
It’s a great partnership that allows us to expand and stretch this new space in local media. We share the belief that by improving the consumer value of Facebook Neighborhoods, the opportunity for real estate listings naturally expands. Makes sense. What’s also exciting, is that this neighborhood engine provides a foundation for international neighborhoods, which is central to the way we think of the business.
Neighborhoods could become a kind of uber-application on Facebook that might include content from numerous other providers (should it evolve that way). It could also be a kind of Fire-Eagle-like infrastructure for location on Facebook generally. But that probably won’t happen given that it’s just one application among many.
Beyond that, Facebook is a network that has location in its legacy but doesn’t really “get” location. Location for Facebook will become more important and self-evident as a strategic asset as the site moves further into mobile.
Other neighborhood database providers include Urban Mapping, Zillow, Maponics. All these are not identical and have varying degrees of depth and nuance. Neighborhood is actually a dynamic and changing boundary and perceived differently by different individuals and “constituencies.”
I spoke before about the panel at Where wherein there was a discussion of the inverse relationship between the granularity of focus on the consumer side and the available ad inventory. Ads don’t really exist for the neighborhood level — advertisers and publishers aren’t that sophisticated yet. There’s lots and lots to discuss about this and the future where location targeting is concerned. But, quickly, again I come back to the idea of demographic targeting once a neighborhood can be accurately targeted.
Imagine brands (e.g., BMW), which have a buyer/prospect profile and want to target users that fit that profile. Accurate local targeting by neighborhood and zip would allow for that on a national basis. But where those ads appear online is part of the challenge ahead.
Direct marketing via snail mail is something like a $190 billion market in the US according to third party estimates. Once demo/local targeting can be cracked, along the lines above, online some of those dollars will migrate online.
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Related: Local Matters is going to take another crack at an IPO.
Microsoft did this with Virtual Earth (it never had a full-blown client) and now Google is importing Earth and all its content and capabilities into the browser.
Here’s my longer write-up from Search Engine Land.
Also at Search Engine Land I published a short interview with Google’s Director of Product Management for Local Carter Maslan about mapspam and how Google thinks about it.
Finally, Chris Silver Smith writes about some “cool sights in Google StreetView.”
I’m in Boston right now and had a meeting with Skyhook Wireless this morning. When I left my hotel I checked Google Maps and Live Search, both showed the same incorrect address and phone number. The phone number was a fax line (also on Goog411) and the address was the old location. The company had moved three months ago.
The website associated with the listing was the company’s Loki site, which didn’t have the corporate address. Email was the thing that saved me after I had gone up the suite where I thought Skyhook would be, only to find an empty floor.
In a very direct way this illustrates the problem with bad or outdated data. Admittedly the address data were only three months out of date, but the bad phone number is pretty “lame,” as they say in the vernacular.
As we become more dependent on mobile maps the risk of this kind of problem becomes greater.
Another, related issue occurred when I walked with some other folks on Monday night (Memorial Day) from restaurant to restaurant trying to find one that was open in the North End. It would’ve been helpful to have some sort of indication of whether these places were open on my mobile device (of course this would be very difficult to accomplish because it was an isolated holiday).
Finally, I’d like to suggest some sort of display of travel time on foot vs. in the car on these mobile mapping applications so I can make a decision about whether I want to spend 12 or 15 bucks on a cab or walk when it’s a nice day I can still make the appointment time — notwithstanding the bad address information
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Ted Morgan and Jed Rice of Skyhook fed me their “famous” Belgian waffles when I got there (actually very good). They told me a whole story about the significance of the waffles, prompting me to suggest that the corporate logo should be changed to a waffle.
Someone correct me if this is wrong . . . but Google claims that its Maps are the most widely used by third parties throughout the Internet. It’s a little bit curious that the company has started a video showcase of mapping implementations to promote its Maps and API.
These are “mapping success case studies.” It’s as if this were a new product trying to gain visibility and acceptance.
At the Where 2.0 show there were some who wanted Google to release “AdSense for Maps” and others who were quite ambivalent about that potential offering.
Yesterday at the “Google Factory Tour,” lots of things were discussed and a couple of things were announced, the “biggest” of which were Google Health going live and display ads for Google Image search. I live blogged it at SEL.
One of the presentations was from Director of Product Management for Local, Carter Maslan. Local and Maps came up numerous times during the discussion in fact. One of the developments that I was not aware of on Google was the recent introduction of a zip-code prompt for certain general but geographically ambiguous queries. Here’s the screen:
Why is this interesting? For one, Google will have zip-level location information for individuals and can personalize results accordingly. So queries such as “Parks” or “Zoo” or others that fail to include a geo-modifier can deliver locally relevant results.
And, as you guessed, it also allows Google to target ads to the zip level — assuming they exist. (In mobile Google can do something similar with “My Location.”) Google can also infer location for registered users from their Map and Directions queries and can tailor results accordingly. This all supplements IP Targeting.
At lunch, I made the argument to Carter Maslan that with zip-level (or neighborhood-level) targeting, layering US Census data on top of Google’s map-based AdWords interface, turns it into demographic targeting. The challenge for Google is the company would have to add another, sophisticated layer to its algorithm so that it served different ads (based on demographic information) for the same queries to different users based on their home zips or neighborhoods.
Not sure that Google is ready to do that or that the advertisers are yet that sophisticated, despite spending billions on direct mail offline, which is a version of the same thing.
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I should add that if you’re logged in to Google and Google thinks it has your location, you won’t see the prompt.
According to CNet, Google has confirmed that its StreetView image capture also includes a 3D dimension (so to speak): “The imaging technology includes lasers that collect 3D geometry data.”
The company had previously been relying on the SketchUp “community” to model and vote on 3D images. There had also been contests (e.g., build your campus) to accelerate efforts at 3D coverage in Google Earth. By contrast, Microsoft uses automated 3D rendering and has a considerable lead over Google in terms of the number of 3D models it has “built.”
However a year ago, reportedly, Google began to license (from Stanford) automated 3D rendering technology. I spoke to Google Maps/Earth product manager Stephen Chau at the Where 2.0 show about automated 3D rendering efforts on Google Earth, StreetView issues and Maps in General. Google wasn’t ready to publicly discuss some of the things we talked about, including automated 3D image capture. However, as the quote appears to indicate above, the company has confirmed it’s collecting the 3D data itself.
So what does all this mean? Among other things, I suspect eventually we’ll see more and more of Earth’s capabilities, including 3D imagery, in Maps within a browser. The back end/platform for both is the same. At Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D is a browser plug in. And EveryScape operates entirely within a browser environment.
I’ve written at length in the past about how these 3D environments become interesting new canvasses for social networking, travel, ecommerce, news and so on. They also have a potentially compelling life on a large screen as Internet access via conventional TVs becomes more common in the next several years.
Over the past couple of days Urban Mapping has put out press releases saying that it now has neighborhood maps/boundaries for “40,000 neighborhoods in 2,000 U.S. cities and towns. This is in addition to 10,000 neighborhoods in Canada and Europe.” It also has detailed data for 53 transit systems across the US. (Here’s more discussion/explanation on the Urban Mapping blog.)
This is tons and tons of data. Google Transit covers a somewhat smaller area of the US but has more international coverage.
Urban Mapping CEO Ian White articulated “the keyword conspiracy” in his remarks on the monetization panel at Where 2.0.
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Disclosure: I am an advisor to the company.
At the Where 2.0 show Google’s John Hanke in his keynote discussed Google Maps’ evolution from a yellow pages like database of service business listings, plotted on a map, to something much broader. Indeed, Google seems to be rapidly building out Maps will all kinds of additional information. And the community/My Maps feature is a key element of all of it.
The company is also experimenting with how best to surface this information:
Recently it added images from Panaramio (theoretically Flickr should show up too at some point). In addition, there are some other features I just noticed last night:
In a major announcement that was initially not entirely clear to me, Google has partnered with geospatial software provider ESRI to make huge amounts of third party data (live feeds) available to mapping sites and mashups. Google will be converting all the involved third party data into KML files, which can be searched and then easily accessed by local sites, mashups or third party online (or mobile) mapping providers.
In addition Google said that it was providing all the KML data that it was indexing to its API. That includes geotagged YouTube files, Panaramio images and tons of other files and data. Most of these data are tied in some way to location.
Now it will be available for free to others who want to build or enhance applications with it. It These combined announcements explode the amount of data available to local sites and the “geoweb.”
Here’s a video of the John Hanke keynote at Where 2.0 (where the announcement was made) if you want to see it.
Virtual Manhattan that is: Google is adding sharper imagery and the ability to “look up” in its new and improved version of StreetView for New York:
As others have reported, Google recently added Panaramio images to Google Maps (but it should also be tapping the Flickr API).
