Nikhil Kothari reveals Virtual Places, which is a mashup of Virtual Earth, and various Internet Connected Components (including Amazon, Weather.com, Flickr, Feedmap, GeoBloggers, GeoURL, MSN Search and MapPoint).
Kayak Buzz brings best airfares
November 6, 2005 By
Ahh, there’s those Google Maps again in another online business.
This time Gary Price writes about Kayak Buzz. This is COOOOL.
You put in a starting city. It shows you where the deals are on the map.
Yes, those are Google ads at the bottom of that site too. Ahh, the attention!
Mislead by Google’s map on way to Mind Camp
November 6, 2005 By
Oh, nasty little online maps.
Quick, I want you to head to your favorite online map service.
Now, look at the front of the Seattle Mind Camp ticket. Type this into your map service:
2811 102nd Street Seattle WA 98168
That’s the address of the Seattle Mind Camp. But, now, look at Google Maps and what it changed the address to:
2811 SW 102nd Street Seattle WA 98168
Buzz Bruggeman (CEO of ActiveWords) and I didn’t notice this yesterday when we first did it. Buzz was driving and stayed at my house. Guess what? That address is about five miles away from the real address.
Virtual Earth takes you to the right address.
Yahoo Maps beta takes you to the wrong place, but at least warns you that it didn’t find the right address.
Lots of people got mislead by the online maps, I learned after we arrived 20 minutes late.
What saved the day? Buzz had Streets and Trips loaded on his computer and that brought us to the right address.
But, other than that, the Mind Camp was great. Buzz and I stayed until about 10 p.m. Wireless was hard to get on, but I didn’t even try after the morning. The conversations were more interesting.
The Seattle PI’s Todd Bishop took good notes. The thing I came way from it? I need to get into Second Life and understand what’s going on there. Another thing I saw for the first time was Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Tara Hunt wrote that session up too. I want to create a virtual software company in that virtual world.
Other good reports are from Rob Stevens, Eric Butler, Nancy White, and Alex Barnett - more on “Mind Camp” on Technorati.
Andru Edwards organized the event. Well done Andru and team! Bunch of photos are over on Flickr. Update: more photos are on the “Mind Camp 1.0″ Tag on Flickr. Update2: I fixed that link, and Ted Leung has a great report on his blog here.
Zvents to announce they are going with Yahoo
November 4, 2005 By
Very strange. I went to the Zvents blog a few minutes ago and they had a whole post here about how they are announcing that they are adding a “powered by Yahoo’s Web services” logo to their site and their geocoding API calls will be driving the percentage of “where” searches and user venue creates that our own Tiger/line server can’t handle. Now it says the post will be up at 11 a.m. Well, since I had an early look at the post, I say congrats to Yahoo, now the hard evangelism work starts cause for every one Zvents there will be hundreds more real soon now and for every pro site there will be hundreds of thousands of blogs that will put little Web components like maps or Flickr bars on their page. Oh, and Jeremy Zawodny, if you think I’m looking past Yahoo to Google like you posted on your blog yesterday, think again. Yahoo is doing some scary smart work in this space. But, the truth of the matter is that Google is disrupting both Yahoo and Microsoft. You have to look no further than this stock price comparison for Yahoo vs. Google for the past year to see how the market thinks so anyway. Here’s one comparing Yahoo to Microsoft. Looks like we’re in a similar boat. Why? Cause Google built an advertising platform — they used their dominance in search to kick into a new world and are trying to use the dominance in AdSense to get dominance in the attention sphere (through patents).
In other words, Jeremy, if we were really smart, we’d start working together with others in the industry to build our own, open, attention API, that we’d agree not to monetize (at least for a decent length of time) and that we’d get everyone to play in. In other words, if we were smart we’d join the Attention Trust. If we could do that then we could disrupt Google.
Remember what Microsoft did with the Office suite? They (er, I guess we, although I didn’t work at Microsoft back then) disrupted Borland, Wordperfect, and others by changing the game. How could they have fought back? By joining forces. But they couldn’t do that cause they didn’t trust each other.
Well, we’re at another juncture in the industry like that. We have maybe a couple of years to do something different and weird. Something that Google isn’t expecting. Can Yahoo trust Microsoft? Can Microsoft trust Yahoo? And, can the two of us trust eBay or AOL? Can eBay or AOL trust Yahoo or Microsoft? Now you know just how hard this will be. Google is building something that’s gonna disrupt all of us. We all individually have advantages. But it’ll take some clear thinking, some good relationship work cross-company (and, internally at Microsoft cross-group, which really is almost as hard as cross-company work anyway).
Oh, and then there’s Steve Jobs saying “think different.” Let’s not forget about him. Or the Washington Post. Or the New York Times. Or ABC TV. Or Starbucks. Or McDonalds. Or CNN. Or or or or. They all have stakes in this game. Ethan wrote that the game he’s playing is one that’s HUGE. Oh, I totally grok that. Google hasn’t even picked off all the low hanging fruit yet from the advertising industry. That’s why their stock just keeps going up and up and up.
Huh? What drugs you doing Scoble? Oh, so you think Google has tapped out the advertising industry, do you? Well, look at Google Maps again. They haven’t started putting ads on that yet. Why not? They don’t need to. But, let’s say their revenues start flattening out. They only need to make two calls: one to Starbucks. One to McDonalds. The call will go something like this: “we’re ready, can you write the check?”
You KNOW Starbucks and McDonalds would love to put time-based advertising on the maps. That’s why this space is so interesting. Imagine doing a search for an address in Seattle. Starbucks could put little logos of where all their coffee stores are. Then, when you mouse over they could say “come in in the next hour and we’ll give you $1 off of a latte, just tell us this code: JXP1.”
Ogilvy Mather tested such a system with cell phones down in Australia with McDonalds and McDonalds saw per-store sales increase by something like $10,000 EACH. Per DAY!!!
So, don’t tell me this thing is done yet. Don’t tell me that ZVents doesn’t matter. Don’t tell me that Yahoo doesn’t see this opportunity. Or Microsoft either.
Oh, and I wish Ethan Stock, CEO of Zvents had asked me what Virtual Earth is up to and why they should bet on Virtual Earth instead of Yahoo or Google. I was talking with the Virtual Earth team yesterday and they have some disruptions of their own up their sleeves that they’ll play out real soon.
Watch the Virtual Earth blog, Chandu Thota’s blog (he’s the guy who did the FeedMap on my blog to the right and he works on the Virtual Earth team), and Via Virtual Earth.
More disruptions ahead!
Zvents CEO says Yahoo to open up its map API
November 3, 2005 By
Yahoo!
Ethan Stock, CEO of Zvents, says that Yahoo is telling him that tomorrow they’ll take the limitations off of Yahoo’s mapping APIs. If that’s true, I have to really thank Yahoo for doing this.
Why? Well, this puts the ball squarely in our court. Er, in Virtual Earth’s court.
Disruption!
Oh, I like this disruption game a lot! (And, yes, we haven’t heard the last of the disruptions in the mapping and advertising and services businesses. Not by a long shot. The mapping game is just getting started and will be going for years.
Next up on the disruption schedule? Gillmor Gang, tomorrow. I wanted to take the day off of blogging and all this stuff but I keep getting disrupted. Heheh.
Another disruption? Microsoft is starting to do acquisitions again. Alex Barnett covers our acquisition of FolderShare.
Yahoo’s new pretty maps are doomed (and so are Microsoft’s)
November 3, 2005 By
Has Google disrupted the businesses of Yahoo and Microsoft? Yes! It got me out of bed to write this post. No, that’s not the disruption I’m talking about (I’ll hopefully be able to take a couple of days off of blogging unless someone else announces something cool between now and the weekend).
To see how you don’t need to look any further than the rejuvenated mapping world.
First, congrats to Yahoo. The new map service you guys made is really killer. Inspiring, even. Here’s TechCrunch’s revealing of it. Here’s Yahoo’s blog about it.
But, it’s doomed. So is our Virtual Earth.
Why? Cause we don’t even realize that Google is playing in the Superbowl and left us playing for the high school championships. It’s nice to win the high school championships, but it isn’t close to the Superbowl.
Now, those are heady words. But, to see just how much disruption Google is wacking us with let me take you to Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. Now, you might not know about Sand Hill Road. But, it’s where the world’s top venture capitalists are. You do not get an address on Sand Hill Road without understanding how to build a profitable business.
Last week I visted a few startups on Sand Hill Road. One was Zvents. I’ve written about them before.
I want you to visit them again. And again. And again. Until you understand the new Google gold rush that’s underway.
Hint: Yahoo and Microsoft’s employees need to get this.
What do they need to get?
That it’s not about maps, it’s about the advertising platform that Google has built. It’s not about prettiness, it’s about who has the most user generated content (I still hate that term).
Huh?
First, let’s focus on the advertising platform component of how Google is disrupting Yahoo and Microsoft.
Google pays Web site owners MAJOR DOLLARS to put its advertising component (er, service) on its Web site.
Visit Zvents. Click on one of the featured events.
See the Google ad component there?
Now, tell me again why that can’t be a Yahoo or Microsoft ad component?
I’ll tell you why. Google’s ad component pays better because of its dominance in search (and, because they told all the banner advertising people and companies to screw off and die — they understood that users will click on blue underlined text and are being rewarded for that understanding).
Quick, what else do you see on the Zvents page?
I see a Google map. With a Google logo.
What don’t you see? No Yahoo map. No Yahoo logo. No Microsoft Virtual Earth map. No Microsoft Virtual Earth logo.
Disruption!
But, it gets worse. Let’s head over to the Yahoo Maps API page. Damn, they’ve done a nice job. It’s clean. It’s easy to understand. It’s sexy. But only until you get to the bottom of the page. Look for “Rate Limit.”
Disruption!
What is there? Here, I’ll copy and paste the text for you. “The Yahoo! Maps Embeddedable APIs (the Flash and AJAX APIs are limited to 50,000 queries per IP per day and to non-commercial use.”
Aha! Yahoo has bean counters too. Don’t feel bad Yahoo. They run the place here at Microsoft too. But, they don’t get what Google is doing to them.
Google is building an advertising platform. It is disrupting our businesses. And we’re letting them do it.
Now, convince Zvents to take that Google Map off of their page and put a Yahoo one (or a Virtual Earth one). Hint: they won’t do it. Why? For two reasons:
1) The Yahoo and Virtual Earth licensing terms keep them from putting the map next to a Google advertising component.
2) There’s a perception that Google will treat companies who stick with all of its components better (maybe by giving a discount in the future, maybe by serving out better ads, maybe, by, alas, making both components better through using attention data!
3) They know that putting Google logos on their site is “cooler” and “more buzz generating” than putting Yahoo or Microsoft logos on their site (and they’d be right, heck, I work for Microsoft and I’m talking about their site).
But, it gets worse for Yahoo and Microsoft. Why?
User generated content. Yes, I still hate that term. But it’s key to how to build a very profitable and sticky business.
I believe Google is going to get there first. Why? Just because they have a development model that lets them move very quickly and get stuff out the door faster than Microsoft or Yahoo. Why do I believe that? Past behavior. Google had its new UI out months before Microsoft and Microsoft had its new UI out months before Yahoo.
Disruption!
So, now, Google will not only have a great advertising platform in place, a great mapping component (I still like it better than Yahoo’s, by the way), but you’ll be seeing that component improve right in front of your eyes through the addition of user generated content. What do I mean?
Well, let’s say you know my favorite Sushi place in Bellevue WA. Here it is on Google’s map. By the way, Google’s map found it INSTANTLY while Yahoo said there were no sushi places in Bellevue. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, by the way, found it too!
Now, let’s say I want to put a photo of the front of the store on the map for you to see. Let’s say I also want to take pictures of the menu. And write a little review.
Wouldn’t that make the map more useful? It would.
More disruption ahead!
So, what can we do to disrupt Google?
Make it possible to take the Google map out of that page and put in a Microsoft or Yahoo one (and keep it next to a Google AdSense bar). That will require telling the bean counters to sit down and be quiet. That won’t be easy. Like I said, they run the world, and we are rapacious, greedy, businesspeople who don’t like to share a service that costs tens of millions of dollars). Google knows this and is laughing all the way to the bank.
Clone the Google API, RossCode says. Clone the Google API, Geek News Central says. Clone the Google API, David Mercer says. Clone the Google API, Alex Barnett says. Clone the Google API, the blogosphere says.
Disruptive!
