Author Archives: Phil

All Things Digital

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On down the west coast, there’s another gathering this week of the technology elite in Carlsbad, CA — D5: The D Conference

The D5 conference is part of All Things Digital which was created by Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Here’s the overview from the site:

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources.

This is when the tech geek in me really wishes I could get my wife to move the west coast. Should be some really cool stuff going on.

The highlight reel of the much hyped presentation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together on the stage can be seen here.

It’s good to be part of the 21st century.

Where 2.0

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The Where 2.0 conference is underway in San Jose. All the big local players are gathered together to share the latest and greatest in location-based technology.

Here’s a quick excerpt from their overview page describing what Where 2.0 is:

Now in its third year, the Where 2.0 Conference is where the grassroots and leading edge developers building location aware technology intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms, and hardware to gain a competitive edge. In the O’Reilly conference tradition, Where 2.0 presents leading trends rather than chasing them.

Visit the blog here, or if you prefer, live Twittering.

It’s also nice to see Garmin participating. Not a lot of big tech firms out of the midwest, but Garmin’s corp headquarters is about 5 blocks from my parent’s house in the suburbs of Kansas City.

Fatdoor Goes Alpha

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fatdoor has launched in alpha mode (SF Bay area only for now).

In a very high-level sense, fatdoor is a new social network focused on localness and aims to have direct ties to the physical community in addition to the online nature of the network.

Per Greg Sterling’s blog, Raj Abhyanker of fatdoor indicates that their goal is to connect neighbors to each other specifically around things like local community, schools and families.

I applaud fatdoor in their efforts. Here at eNeighbors, we are attempting something similar — eNeighbors’ focus is connecting neighbors in their community and offering new ways to more effectively communicate with each other.

The move of social networks to the local level is a great thing to see. Relevance of information and community is starting to grow, and for adults who have little time on their hands to spend online, services like fatdoor will provide a great way to keep in touch with their community.

The Neighborhood Challenge

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Being part of a neighborhood board of directors is a tough job. It’s usually voluntary, so getting that extra effort not only from yourself but from the other board members is a challenge especially since the rewards are only intrinsic in nature.

Anyone that’s ever worked as a project manager knows how difficult it can be to manage a group of people who don’t always see eye to eye on every issue. Additionally, there are a number of community needs that constantly must be met.

I just finished putting together a great outline of these challenges and the corresponding solutions that eNeighbors offers to help conquer these challenges. My hope is that this document will help clarify how valuable the eNeighbors service is to neighborhoods and more specifically managed communities.

Here is the list of challenges addressed in the PDF:

– Communication
– Time Management
– Sense of Community
– Safety Concerns
– Architectural Compliance
– HOA Documentation
– Board Member Turnover
– Privacy of Information
– Community Value

View and download the PDF here

Neighborhood Search from Google

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Last Friday, Google posted on its Lat Long Blog that Google Maps now has neighborhood search capability. To any but the most savvy users, this could be very misleading. Here’s the part that intrigues me:

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.

The part about “informally defined” seems to be loophole to me. And then there’s the caveat of “only available in 50 US cities” which is the misleading part (since the title of the blog post doesn’t specificy “which” neighborhoods).

All this aside, I played along to see what the results would look like in Kansas City. Granted, KC is not the biggest metro in the country, but it’s respectable. My first search for art galleries on the Plaza gave me only one gallery that was actually on the Plaza (I know of at least 10 more). The other two results were in Kansas as far south as Leawood since Google didn’t know the difference between the Plaza and Hawthorne Plaza out south.

Second, I thought I’d try it on an actual neighborhood. I picked Mission Hills since it’s probably the premiere neighborhood in KC with the likes of Henry Block, George Brett, The Halls family, and The Russell Stover’s mansion being just a few of the well known residents. Looking for coffee around the Mission Hills neighborhood was a little better but not much. Only one of the results would I actually classify as being in Mission Hills.

My point in all this is that true neighborhood search still does not exist. It’s not even close. Google is still simply matching keywords to business listings. An actual framework of neighborhoods just doesn’t exist. Yelp comes close, and Urban Mapping has made some headway, but there still isn’t a true neighborhood level index to search from or serve content to.

Bottom line, it takes a lot of good old fashioned hard work, unique local knowledge, and lot of time to build such a network; and it’s just not economically viable for the large search companies to go down that road.

Social Networks & Advertising

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Some good info on ad placement in social networks over on eMarketer today. MySpace and YouTube top the list (not surprising). Driving traffic and brand awareness are the top reasons for the placements. One of the questions posed is how do people use search when they are interacting within these social networks?

Interesting to see Craigslist in the #5 spot for the most ad spend. Good sign that local ad spending and hyper-local audiences are being considered across the board.

Local Social: The Insider View

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Perry Evans posts on the launch of Local Guides today on his blog, evans ink. At first, it seems to be another rehash of local content, but what I think sets it apart is the “guides” aspect. Here’s a way for you (as a local in your community) to provide direction for other people in regards to the “it” places to eat, shop, hang out, etc.

For instance, I’m a huge music junkie. There are a lot of great local bands in Kansas City (where I live) that no one knows about. Here’s an opportunity to provide an insider’s view on the local music scene to someone like myself but who is from another city and is just visiting KC and wants to catch some great local shows.

I also like how the site gears itself towards an experience by using guides. In other words, sight-seeing the Plaza as opposed to just finding a restaurant for lunch.

The other great aspect is the centrality of the service. Everyone in KC knows that The Pitch is the best guide for local music, but people from Boston might not know that. I’m usually not a proponent of nationally-centric sites for local services, but it seems to make sense here due to the content that is being shared and the intent for the information.

Neighborhood Safety

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I received an email last week from one of my neighbors concerning an incident in the neighborhood where an ice cream man asked a child to get in his van. The email contained a message from the local police department that was originally sent to McGruff coordinators and included a case number for anyone experience a similar situation.

Safety situations like this one have to be the most important thing a resident of any neighborhood would care about. Especially if they have children.

The email I received had about thirty email addresses throughout the chain. I know that there are over 300 homes in my neighborhood. That means that potentially only 10% of my neighbors are aware of this problem. Obviously word of mouth plays a significant part in alerting the community, but that still leaves a significant portion of the neighborhood uninformed.

The Bulletins feature of eNeighbors is the perfect tool to instantly alert your entire community of any type of emergency. I think this is one of the most valuable services eNeighbors provides. Additionally, this scenario made me think of potential integration points with local safety officials. Imagine if the city police were able to alert multiple neighborhoods by using the eNeighbors network of communities.

Learn more about eNeighbors

The Local Rant

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Ahmed Farooq has a great rant on his blog, tech soapbox, about paid reviews and how useless and ineffective they’ve become. But the thing that grabbed my attention was buried in the middle — Ahmed provides some outstanding insight to the difficulty of understanding and utilizing local data.

(The following is in reference to their product iBegin Source)

“I’ll admit people have a hard time understanding the significance – local data is expensive, and that is why we keep seeing the same re-hashed sites. Plus – local data is inaccurate. Horribly so.”

Bottom line is, guys like Ahmed have been working on the data trying to figure out a way to make it relevant. To make it contextual. To make it usable. While other sites (like us here at eNeighbors) are trying to gather the users in one place. A place where local data is again — relevant.

So how do we bring this local data together and give it to the users?

Once again, I think the reason this is so hard is because when you go to Google, Yahoo or MSN, you start at the top. Then you work your way down to the city level. Then if your lucky, you can get to your community level (this is where Ahmed’s comment about the horrible inaccuracies kicks in).

It just makes sense to approach the users from the bottom up. I understand the cost issues associated with keeping a presence in every community in the country — it can’t be done. That’s why you let the residents do it.

But the problem is, they have to care enough to do their share of the work. Why should they care? No one has made it apparent as to how they will benefit. It’s not clear how their input will make their lives better. We need a way for residents to engage in conversation with other residents and in turn provide that missing link of local information that they seek, but don’t fully understand.

Ta da! It’s here. eNeighbors provides this exact sort of communciation platform, and in turn also allows the hyper-local presence that is a perfect match for local data on small businesses at the community level.

 Learn more about eNeighbors

eNeighbors Stats

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We’ve been up and running with our beta application for about 2 months now, so I thought I’d share some stats with you. So far, traction is good, and the activity trending is very promising.

Overview:
15 neighborhoods online
1222 registered users at 1157 unique addresses

Most of these communities have only been active for a few weeks. So far, our adoption rate is about 20% which is right on track with what we’ve seen in the past. It usually takes about 2-3 months to get to an average of 60-80% of a neighborhood online.

These neighborhoods are already posting some impressive traffic patterns:

Reporting period 4/12 – 5/11:
5,500 visits
55,000 page views
4.75 minutes average visit duration

Even more impressive, out of 1222 registered users, only 7 have opted to not receive our eNewsletter.

All of these data points reaffirm our assumptions: we have a uniquely captured audience that perceives great value from our service.

Have a great weekend! It’s beautiful outside (at least in Kansas City, anyway).