Yearly Archives: 2007
Where 2.0 Conference Launch Pad
Mashable reports today…
O’Reilly is holding the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose next week on May 29-30, and its Launch Pad portion of the conference will give a handful of search and mapping companies an opportunity to debut their products, which have all been deemed powerful, innovative and promising. Here is a quick rundown of the companies that will be launching at the Where 2.0 conference, most of which are currently in private beta.
Many of these efforts may well impact local online efforts.
Dopplr is a social network formed around your locations.
Fatdoor is looking to be the wikipedia of people, with a reported 130+ million people and business profiles at launch, to be used for search purposes.
GeoCommons is a service to provide people with a way to tell their stories with maps.
Swivel offers graphs and charts on a number of topics, such as extra-marital affairs by country.
UpNext is a 3D virtual cityscape, providing users a way to explore cities.
WeoGeo is a mapping marketplace of sorts, providing tools for business mapping such as surveyors, engineers, cartographers, and scientists for storing, searching and sharing CAD and GIS mapping products.
Online Ad Revenue Grows 35% in 2006
According to a new report, online ad revenue climbed to about $17B in 2006, a 35% gain over 2005.
Branded display ads and search placements helped the online ad industry post its best year ever in 2006, according to numbers released Wednesday by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Overall, revenue increased 35% last year to $16.9 billion–due in large part to record fourth-quarter revenue of $4.8 billion.
Both search revenue and display revenue climbed 31% year-over-year, to $6.8 billion and $5.4 billion, respectively. Search accounted for 40% of last year’s revenues, slightly lower than the 41% it commanded in 2005. Display advertising, classifieds and referrals accounted for 32%, 18% and 8% of last year’s full revenues, respectively.
See more details here.
Front Porch Forum is just getting its sponsorship program rolling, and we’re going with a flat rate per ad approach. This report states that 48% of online ads work that way, while 47% of the ad deals are based on ad performance.
Palore and EveryBlock Answer One Question
From today’s Local Onliner…
We’re all guilty of feature creep. A lot of the stuff isn’t especially useful. Now comes Palore. When it comes to directory listings, Palore believes hardly any of the info is useful. In fact, consumers want to know just one thing.
“The interesting thing was that they all wanted just one thing and didn’t care much about the rest. It was all about users wanting to see something very specific and personalized to them when making a local search,” says [Palore co-founder Hanan] Lifshitz, an Israeli who had previously started a banner exchange network. “They didn’t want more reviews or better maps. They wanted to know things like:
* The size of a restaurant’s wine list
* Does the business have handicap access?
* Is the business sustainable / vegetarian / organic etc.
* Is there free wifi access?
* Did the restaurant win any award?With such results in mind, Lifshitz launched Palore in Israel a year ago. The service quickly got 100,000 – quite a landmark in a small country – capped it there, and has been working on bringing it stateside since then. He’s raised $1 million from angels to do so, and has set up shop in the Bay Area.
Sounds compelling. In Burlington, lots of folks just post those questions to their neighborhood forum via Front Porch Forum. Not only do they get good results, but they foster relationships with their real-time in-the-flesh neighbors in the process. Next time, they’ll just call out over the backfence to ask about the wine list… offline. (horrors!)
Also… I was just reading more about EveryBlock, the pre-start-up about to get underway by Adrian Holovaty, late of washingtonpost.com and recent winner of a $1.1M grant from the Knight Foundation. His project… To create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block. His goal… To create an easy way to answer the question, “What’s happening around me?” Hey! That’s one question again.
Big Money for Local Online Projects
From the Local Onliner today…
The Knight Foundation has just issued a list of really big grants that should really jumpstart hyper-local media (and some more traditional media endeavors as well). As Knight itself says, its “News Challenge” was meant to combine “nerds, news and neighborhoods.”
This year’s recipients are getting more than $12 million. In my view, the money is coming at a great time, just as confidence in hyperlocal as both a movement and an “industry” has begun to wane.
Read the full post for details on some of the winners, such as Placeblogger and Villagesoup.
Google’s Vint Cerf calls for e-Respect
A friend just shared this bit from NPR by Google Vice President Vint Cerf (thanks Nancy).
Once, I was being driven by limo to a hotel in Palm Springs to give a speech. The driver appeared to be in his 60s, and I remember thinking, “How sad that he has to keep working at this menial job.” It turned out, though, that he was the retired CFO of a major Chicago-based corporation who had gotten bored with golf. He took a part-time job driving the hotel’s limo, so he could meet people and stay in touch with the world. He even ended up giving some good advice to me, a financially naive engineer.
I believe that every person deserves respect, and that I can learn something new from everyone. Now, I make a point of asking people about their stories…
He goes on to call for civility on online mediums too. Amen… that’s one of planks of the platform on which Front Porch Forum is built.
Neighborhood Mapping
An increasing number of mapping services are incorporating neighborhood data. Google appears to be the latest…
Recently Google Maps introduced the ability to perform searches by neighborhoods. Neighborhoods tend to be somewhat informally defined but well recognized in certain cities. Neighborhood search is now available in fifty US cities, with more to follow.
You can now do searches such as bagels upper east side new york and restaurants, over the rhine, cincinnati on Google Maps. Additionally, this capability allows you to do city-level searches where the city is uniquely named, regardless of size, such as bakery corpus christi, or movie theater albuquerque.
Others include Maponics, Yahoo!, Yelp and others, according to Screenwerk and Unhandled Perception, among others.
Good Web Host Recommended
Some folks have taken the time to share their appreciation of Front Porch Forum with me today. That’s a wonderful thing. As one of them wrote about people’s tendencies to criticize…
Although positive feedback may not make it through as much as negative in general, it’s usually there. So many of us need a gentle reminder to share our positive thoughts and feelings in an effort to build a healthy community (and to give some context for our more constructively critical thoughts).
So this spurs me to share the great experience I’ve had for past nine months with JP Peach and Associates, the web host for this blog and Front Porch Forum. Peach, the man behind the company, knows his stuff and does a great job meeting specific needs. We started at one of the big daddy web hosting companies (although not THE Big Daddy), and they simply could NOT meet our specific needs. With Peach it’s been no problem. And his prices are reasonable.
If you’re looking for a web host along these lines, check out Peach. From the site…
The flexible organization of J.P.Peach & Associates allows us to offer a wide range of services at a significant cost savings compared to other software companies. We are a collection of independent contractors and keep our overhead cost low by not maintaining a bricks-and-mortar location.
Our company and web hosting are built on flexibility. Over the years we have used a large number of web hosting services, from the cheap to the expensive, and have never been really happy with any of them. They forced us into a “hosting package” that never really fit our client’s needs. So, we decided to set up our own server so that we can have full control over it. If you want to host your site with us we will customize the services and software to fit your needs. We have “hosting packages” but they are only a starting point, we will customize the hosting services to meet your specific needs.
[I’m not getting any compensation for this plug… it’s just good karma to acknowledge a job well done.]
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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