Seeing Forests

Google Maps Discovery

admin — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:34:28 +0000

It seems like the new discovery capability in Google Maps is still just based on search results and some basic categories. The example given was trying to figure out what to do with some kids on the weekend. Clicking on a museum that mentions kids somewhere in related content and then having a new map presented with a bunch of other museums that mention kids somewhere in their content is a step in the right direction but it’s still just text matching with some basic categorization of points of interest. Another example starts with clicking on a sushi restaurant and then shows all of the other restaurants with “Sushi” in the name nearby. Highlighting those who have been reviewed by friends helps only if you have friends you trust know anything about sushi. And the other example of “personalizing” the map by highlighting all of the places I’ve already been doesn’t seem to help me discover anything new, merely reminds me of how I don’t get out enough.

Local Mobile Discovery App Review

admin — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:56:16 +0000

A recent article on Techcrunch announcing that AroundMe has passed the 6 million user mark, prompted me to take another look at this application. I thought I’d try to understand why this app may be popular and, while I was at it, take a look at some other major local discovery apps. I thought I’d propose the following use case. Suppose you’ve come down to the lobby of your new hotel first thing in the morning and you’re hungry but you’re in a hurry. What do you do? (Let’s say asking the concierge is not an option). Glancing out on the street reveals nothing obvious so you whip out your smartphone. How do you “discover” something right next door? You don’t necessarily know exactly what you want. You’d like something new or surprising or different. So, you whip out your smartphone and consider the options. (In these examples I just searched around my house, so experiences may vary.)

FourSquare will now give you a bunch of options with their “Explore” feature. Although their first selection in Explore always seems to be Walgreens (presumably paid inclusion) it starts asking you if you’re up for a meal or maybe some coffee or just want to go shopping. At least the UI is trying to engage you in a conversation, attempting to offer you a wide range of options at least tangentially focused on determining your needs. At the top of the list is their “Top Picks”, invariably restaurants, but at least there’s a chance you’re going to want what a lot of other people already had. I do appreciate some of the time-sensitivity they display (such as asking about taking a coffee break). And the photos really add to the experience but they’re not always organized well and you’ll end up doing a lot of scrolling. You can search, of course, but then again, remembering the use case, you can’t really say you’re hungry and the term “food” is just a category synonym for restaurants and bars.

Yelp and their “Nearby” functionality cuts right to the chase: Restaurants, Bars, Coffee & Tea and other assorted top categories. They have an “Everything” option but it is really not much help, mixing as it does Auto Repair garages with nearby Insurance Agents. Leaving aside the “Hot New Businesses” option (for another article perhaps), the “More Categories” offers a general “Food” category but again, this is more a collection of categories for Restaurants and Coffee Shops - no results for either the 7 Eleven or Whole Foods around the corner (although there is a separate category for Convenience Stores under the Food Category - they just don’t show up in “All Food”). Their augmented reality version called “Monocle” seduces but is limited to the well-reviewed restaurants and in doing so ends up showing results miles away. In fact, their default radius of search results seems to be about the widest of all the options, requiring a great deal of work trying to zoom in.

Google+ Local gives you categories with icons for Restaurants, Coffee, and what everybody wants first thing in the morning, Pizza. They may just about the fewest category options, focusing you as you can imagine on search. Their Restaurants option shows off their search results ordering logic with Zagat reviews driving them instead of the user-generated reviews. Their developer heritage comes to the fore with options for Distance, Open Now, Rating and Price right there under the search box instead of being buried in “Filter” like Yelp or completely absent it seems in FourSquare. And, yet again, Food means Restaurants and Coffee Shops. At least their default search radius doesn’t seem to cover half a city.

Where makes a promising start with “Eat & Drink” but we’re driven yet again to another mega “Restaurants and Coffee Shops” category. One of the more concerning things about Where is the quality of the listings themselves. Multiple results for the same business are accompanied by results for closed businesses as well - even businesses that were closed before the other business that was closed at the same location are returned. As I alluded to with the “Hot New Businesses” option for Yelp, managing new and closed businesses is both an opportunity and a challenge for Local Search and Discovery applications. Purging closed businesses would seem to be essential for sustaining credibility. It’s probably just quite noticeable around me as there have been some rapid closings and opening of new restaurants.

AroundMe, like Yelp, cuts right to the chase again, providing links to Restaurants, Bars, and Coffee Shops from the main screen. Here, some of the differences start to emerge between AroundMe and the other apps. AroundMe has aggregated many more “local” feeds than the other major local apps, singling out things like Parking, ATMs, and Movies. In addition, the default search radius seems to be more in keeping with walking than driving that other apps assume. It may not be much but these little things might just add up to why AroundMe seems to be doing well - a focus on a simple user experience, a broader set of local categories, and more immediately actionable result sets.

UrbanSpoon, that darling of shaking roulette UI design, drives down better than most on addressing this use case, which makes sense given their focus on food. Fortunately, you don’t have to scroll too far through their magazine layout to get to a “Breakfast/Brunch” option (thought I wouldn’t exactly term that a “cuisine”). You’ll be rewarded with results much more tuned to your needs than the rest but still it assumes you’re gonna want to sit down to eat. And they can be forgiven for not including results for fruit at Whole Foods because their proposition is clear from the beginning - they’re all about the sit down. Plus, UrbanSpoon gives you additional ways to slice and dice your result set, such as by cuisine or food “type”.

It seems you can group almost all of the Yellow Pages derived apps (YellowPages, YellowBook, YPMobile, and SuperPages) together as they are all remarkably similar. Each tries to extend their offering like AroundMe with multiple content sources (well, at least with Specials and Coupons). All take a pretty programmatic approach to UI design with an emphasis on search. Surprisingly, all of them seemed a bit challenged in the listing quality as they can’t quite seem to leverage the power of something like Google or the proprietary and specialized content from Yelp, FourSquare and UrbanSpoon. AroundMe is similarly challenged but the tradeoff just might be overall simplicity of use.

You can look at the competitive offerings in a number of different ways. From the analysis I conducted here, I put together a local mobile product positioning diagram based in two dimensions. Vertically, I positioned the offerings with respect to their content sources. Those offerings closer to the top attempted to differentiate themselves with more proprietary and/or specialized content sources; those at the bottom attempted to do so by offering a wider range of content that might be more generically available. Horizontally, I positioned the offerings with respect to their user interface experience. Those offerings towards the left took a more programmatic, search-based approach; those towards the right took a more browsing, discovery-based approach. The relative positioning of each offering is meant to be more illustrative than definitive.

One site that I think best illustrates an approach that helps the discovery of local products with the use of specialized content sources is TheFind. I searched for something specific on the site (knives) and was presented with a list of results that showed availability at Office Depot (office supply company), Sports Authority (sporting goods company), and Ace Hardware (a hardware supply company). While not quite responding to a simple need, like I’m Hungry, and having a list of breakfast choices returned, it does show how products can break out of the “category jails” they are in for most local discovery applications. This is a step in the direction of having an Internet of Things where the products you might be interested in almost advertise their own locations. A long way from there but the direction seems clear. Consumers will ultimately connect directly to the things that satisfy their needs regardless of the kind of company that just happens to be providing them around you.

Trigger Terms

admin — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:06:55 +0000

We all lament the problem with local data: its inaccuracies, non-existence, and irrelevance. We all dream of Deep Content shimmering below the surface of Big Data. Companies like SinglePlatform are collecting full menus of businesses like restaurants and spas (and end up being worth 8 figures). Many applications are trying to “get the goods” on the offerings of different businesses through various means, like taking photographs of your favorite dishes at a restaurant (lobster cavatelli with ricotta gnocchi). When you’re in a hurry or driving by at 60mph, though, you don’t always have time to do this perusal though. So, we have this problem where on the one end of the spectrum, we don’t even have a business listing and at the other end of the spectrum for select business listings we have more information than we can reasonably use in some critical cases.

We certainly have to continuously work on getting the baseline data complete and correct - business name, address, main phone number. After that, we start throwing businesses in category jails: Italian Restaurant, Pizza Parlor, Bakery. This has value but depending on how this data is used it can quickly become meaningless - a map of 10 Pizza Parlors around you is still pretty generic (and can miss the great pizza in the Italian Restaurant).

So, I’m advocating for soliciting what I call “trigger terms” - those key phrases that summarize a business so succinctly that we can rely upon a person to “fill in” the rest. Terms that trigger almost a complete picture of what a place provides without necessarily picking through the indexed regurgitation of an entire menu. Examples of trigger terms to me are “New York Style Pizza”, “Authentic French Pastries”, and “Fresh Local Pastas”. Immediately, you can start differentiating offerings (New York, Chicago, Colorado Style Pizzas). You can almost smell the difference - and there’s nothing more powerful for evoking imagery than smell.

Not quite going so far as to try to develop some kind of digital olfactory offering but I hope the point is reasonable. Of course, there are a lot of interesting questions surrounding this approach (like what’s Authentic or Local) but at least this is a little further away from content derived from opinion and review (like BEST PIZZA). And there certainly is some fuzziness around categories (Northern Italian Cuisine) but still feel like getting the right trigger terms for a business is the missing link between getting the basic business information right and getting Deep Content for a business. At the end of the day, it’s all about getting away from these anachronistic Yellow Page-derived categories (a legacy of the print book) and moving towards a more genuine and authentic way of describing a business quickly.

Ford Automobile App Platform

admin — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:39:15 +0000

TechCrunch just announced that Ford is promoting a hackathon for Automobile Application Access via Applink. It’s always been a blind spot to me since it always seemed the car was a closed system but to see at least some measure of open access sets the mind to wandering. Have submitted our ThingsThere app as a candidate but not holding breath. Still, I think this is the ultimate for the LoMo of SoLoMo but wonder where the social is in the local mobile in this context. Nothing like a friend finder at 80 mph.

Local Discovery Sucks

admin — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:11:11 +0000

I posted a version of my “Lucky Zombies” presentation (on YouTube and at ThingsThere) for crowd-building our ThingsThere Local Discovery app. I think it illustrates why Local Discovery sucks and how we can do better. In this UrbanTag post, Three Reasons local discovery is broken, the author believes that local discovery is broken due to pay-for-checkins, users can’t control their data, and apps ignore social graces. All potentially valid points but that’s not why local discovery is broken. It’s broken because the data model is broken.

Everyone starts from basically the same data model and that data model is based on the century-old model of business categories, derived from the printed yellow pages. The only way to linearly present a huge number of data points is to chunk them into categories and then present the results alphabetically (hence, the plethora of AAA Plumbers around the world). Since this is the data model carried forward to the online world, that’s what all of the local apps use. Businesses are either a restaurant, a coffee shop, or a bookstore (heaven help the business that serves lunch from the coffee bar that you can enjoy over in the book stacks). Of course, business can have multiple categories but simply making sure you’re business hasn’t been marked “closed” by someone from an opposing social network is enough of a challenge.

We believe that your social cohort can play an effective role in Local Discovery but there seems to be this sort of “Facebookotology” at play, a cross between Facebook and Scientology that takes the mantra that only people in you social network can help you find a bagel around the corner. Sure, I’m OK with some of my friends’ food interests, but I’d rather take advice from folks that fit my general demographic (25, fit, and tan) to discover new things. But they’re not really going to help with the core use case for local discovery - I’m at a particular location at a particular time of day and have a particular need to fill.

So, this is what we’re trying to solve with ThingsThere, our Local Discovery app (and website) described in the video. We know the real problem is the data model (and the collection of data relevant to that model). We also know the ultimate challenge is gaining enough users to garner attention for the app. But, we’re small and we need to keep focused on our core business - building on our Trajectory Knowledge Platform that’s key to modeling and gathering the content necessary for applications like ThingsThere. What we’ve decided to do is just throw it out there - describe exactly what it is we’re trying to do and see if we can “crowd it” - from design to funding. Kind of like Stone Soup. We’ll see where it goes.

The Knowledge Graph and the Local Graph

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:47:06 +0000

Pretty interested in Google’s announcement of the Knowledge Graph today. Finally, someone at the top of the food chain is talking about relationships and how you use them to connect concepts together to provide better search experience. Very interested in how this relates to Local, obviously. Spent a little time this afternoon splitting out our take on what we’ve been calling the Local Graph from how we build pieces of the Knowledge Graph with Trajectory, what I’m now calling our Knowledge Graph Platform, LOL. Going to have a lot more to say about this after I dig into what’s going on with the Knowledge Graph and how it relates to Local. Just thought I’d get this out first.

Top 10 Crowdsourcing Lessons

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:23:29 +0000

Just posted our Top 10 Crowdsourcing Lessons over at Brilliant Arc. Provided some observations on how we’re applying ontology for tagging tens of thousands of photos of homes per week. Hope it makes for some interesting perspective. The focus is mostly on leveraging the benefits of having an ontology for collecting structured data and doing so economically at-scale. But after all the technology is said and done, it turns out doing right by the community is the most important thing you can do - surprise. Think the trick has been to develop a back-end platform that really enhances the engagement experience. Love anyone’s thoughts on the piece.

Updated BrilliantArc.com

admin — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:50:16 +0000

Thought I’d give “making sense” a shot in updating our Brilliant Arc website. Really happy with the level of maturity that our Trajectory Local Knowledge Management platform has reached. Think it’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet for managing a taxonomy of categories and keywords - just without the spreadsheet part. Also, really pleased with our Collaborative Tagging extension to the platform called Crowd. We’re processing thousands of photographs a week, taking a feed of photographs of dubious relevance and returning high-quality, relevant photographs richly tagged. Most happy. Sean is a monster rock star architect and developer. Please, stop trying to hire him.

Done with FourSquare

admin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:58:36 +0000

I’m done with FourSquare. After being Mayor of Sushi Den for what seems like years, I had gotten lazy about checking in and was de-throned (un-elected?) by a clearly obsessive-compulsive. Being hyper-competitive, of course, I made a comeback. Along the way, I learned how cheating gets you dinged (very impressive), and how doing things the right way gets you rewarded (not quite clear how). After checking into Sushi Den 227 times, with 52 checkins in the last month and 11 consecutive days in a row at last count (take that, obsey-compy), I’ve decided to call it quits. And I’ll tell you why. If you know me, you know I can be rather ingratiating (hating people in general seems to help here). I can definitely count genuine friends among the staff of Sushi Den. Overall, I’m confident I have a solid relationship with everyone I know there (the sous chefs not withstanding). Last night I went again (specifically for this kick-ass clams appetizer they have been serving). Because of my nearly religious patronage (enhanced by my FourSquare mayorship - even getting embarrasingly greeted that way), I got very good treatment. While not trying to take overt advantage of this (ok, maybe asking for some people sitting in my usual seat to get seated early was a stretch), I was afforded protection over a new seat opening up for me, got to talk to several of the staff that made it a point to come over and say hello, and ultimately got extra bread for the clam dish (an apparent - and in retrospect clearly selfish - imposition on a very busy kitchen). It was a chaotic evening and my presence (at least in my presumptive opinion of self-worth) was disruptive. So, all-in-all, I have no life and the life I am leading (with behavior driven in part by FourSquare) was making me more of jerk than I already am.

FourSquare, in essence, drives me to be more of a creature of habit than I already am. This is even reinforced by the so-called “explore” functionality of FS. It should be rightly be called “ignore” as the top results give you places you’ve already been! Where’s the “exploration” in that? Of course, it also gives you places nearby that your friends have also visited which, in my case, is usually everywhere I’ve already been as well since I’ve usually gone there with them. I want to DISCOVER new things. I want to EXPAND my world (which, admittedly, isn’t very hard). FourSquare is driving me to be stupidly boring (which obviously isn’t hard). It’s measurably changing my behavior (which is a good thing for Sushi Den). I’m not learning anything new. I’m not being encouraged to get out of my rut (which is incredibly deep and lovingly contoured). And what do I get in return? A pathetic sense of self-importance, a broader waistline and a narrower mind because my real-world behavior have been shaped by this imaginary application

So, I’m done with FourSquare. FourSquare is aptly named. But the brand association is no longer with that fun little game we played as kids. It’s become a box that actually shrinks as time goes by. So, I’m done. I’m stepping out of the box and back into the world. Gonna build a new app along the way.

GeoLoqi Et Al

admin — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:04:17 +0000

Thought I’d get my Latin on with that title. As usual, Greg is spot-on with his take on all the SXSW Local/Social/Mobile apps. The unending fascination this generation’s entrepreneurs have with finding out where their friends are never ceases to amaze. I could care where my friends are and even less where they eat. (Not really, but, hey). I’d say some of these sentiments are echoed in a R/W Web post as well. Coming up with the idea of having an app that recognizes when someone else using the same app is within 50 feet of you is jaw-dropping - in kind of a contracting tetanus kind of jaw-dropping way. Any of those apps that get closer to showing MY TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC in a completely anonymous and preferably historical manner (people like you go to THIS restaurant and avoid THAT restaurant with all the people running all of these other apps) is going to win in my mind. Of course, that’s not enough for an app but it’s a start.

But Greg goes on to discuss GeoLoqi. It seems to me that most location-based services default to what I’d call “point-based” solutions - what is someone’s specific coordinates on the planet right now. GeoLoqi is providing what I’d call “area-based” solutions - what is someone’s specific coordinates relative to some specific geographic area over a period of time (the geek in my really wants to call these “manifold” solutions - what’s my vector relative to the four-dimensional space-time manifold - but I won’t allow him to clutter-up the conversation). I think the point is that out of everything that I can hear echoing from SXSW (which technically is south-by-southeast to me) GeoLoqi seems to have the most substance.