What are you doing this holidays?

So, the big question these days is what are your plans for the holidays, I say, nothing much, planning to hit code complete on for a couple of interesting features :), and plan fun things to do with 2Hs and T... 

As an an online planning company, we want to make holiday planning easy and simple for you - so we even created a holiday planning center to pull all relevant content from different sections of our site. In this context, couple of days ago I came across a blog post by Isabel Adams that talked about how Center'd saved her time in getting her friends together for the holidays. In that post she said:

I absolutely hate planning things. Overwhelmed by the flurry of overlapping text messages (I'm more of a texter than a caller), the decisions of where to go and what to do, and the question of when everyone can hang out, I go crazy. Clearly, I should not consider event planning as a future career.

With Christmas Break approaching, I decided to look into potential ways to get my old group of friends together AND maintain my sanity. That led me to Center'd, an online planning tool centered on "people, places, and plans."...

That's precisely the reason why we created our tool set: from sign-up sheets to task lists to online invitations to place and time voting - we just want you to organize and plan things and keep your sanity - then Isabel continues and says:

Just by logging on I’m given suggestions for where to go or what to see! Plus, if I need to fall back on my tried-and-true locations, I can save them in my "Favorites" section for easy access in the future. Center'd also provides searches for holiday-themed events, has ready-made plans to help you through stressful situations (like finding gifts for everyone on your list), and allows you to "explore" your neighborhood and find restaurants, hotels, bakeries, and other businesses you might not have known about before.

There, in that simple paragraph, she summarized how discovery is a core part of making plans. And that's why we are tagging all things interesting to bring you places wherever we find them: from romantic places in San Francisco to fun places in Chicago to expensive places in New York - and of course, we also have my all time favorite Cafe Iberico Chicago on our site too ;-)

So, what are your plans for the holidays?

Whatever they are, make sure to plan well and be sure to have fun - happy holidays!

Photo credit: jmtimages

Google Maps Street View Update

Very cool updates from Google Maps for Street View this morning - I think the new interface is easier to use. RWW and other blogs are already reporting this welcoming update. While I still think that the Virtual Earth Bird's Eye View (yes, I'm still a bit biased) is richer with visuals when you are trying to get a sense of the physical world around a given location - the quality of Google's Street View is definitely getting better and better.

I still have to give this a try on my iPhone though, but Mike seems to think it's cool!

Quick question: I wonder if anyone has tried using Google's Street View for store-front photo view - if the coverage is good, I would love to give it a try on Center'd business profiles - any thoughts?

Vote for Center'd!

And you thought we are done with elections? :) Nah, there is one more reason to vote today - Center'd made it to the top 10 finalists in the Mashable Open Web awards under "Places and Events" category - and guess what - every vote counts! Please vote for Center'd today and thank you so much for your votes from the previous round!

Thanks again for your vote!

Nominate Center'd for Mashable Open Web Awards!

I have been so busy building cool stuff at my beloved company these days and I barely get any time to blog :D - but will fix that in coming days.

Talking about Center'd, just this morning I came across an interesting poll from Mashable re: open web awards and thought it would be cool to nominate Center'd in "Places and Events" category. Here is a blurb from Mashable regarding this poll:

Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories. This year, we’re partnering with over 100 blog partners, Poll Daddy for extra security and ease of voting and extending the nominations period and voting rounds for greater participation.

So, if you are a Center'd user and if you like what we do with the cool integration of local, social and activity planning - pl. submit your nomination for our company below.

And if you haven't been using Center'd - give it a try or if you don't like something you see on our site, let us know at feedback@centerd.com or just email me at chandu@centerd.com.

Thanks in advance for your help! :)

Where do your users come from: detecting user location on websites

Detecting your website user's (approximate) location has huge benefits in providing relevant experience without them telling you anything. There are a couple of techniques available today that let you do that: a) detect approximate location by IP address b) detect more accurate location using WiFi base stations (and their MAC Addresses) c) Cell tower triangulation (mobile client only) d) GPS (mobile client only). If you limit the options purely for Web Browsers and Desktops, its just IP and WiFi based location detection that's available today.

The IP Address based detection is less accurate but hassle free (your users don't need to install anything); implementing such a solution usually means that you license an IP to Geo database to look up parts of IP address to calculate a latitude/longitude value; which is fairly simple thing to do. Having said that, if you are using Google Maps for your website, detecting user's location using IP address has gotten much easier: Google maps announced that the developers can now detect user's approximate location based on their IP address at the time of loading the map. According to the documentation, the implementation looks fairly straight forward:

//Load the map.
function loadMaps() {
    google.load("maps", "2", {"callback" : mapsLoaded});
}

//Check if the client location is available. If it is set map center.
function mapsLoaded() {

    if (google.loader.ClientLocation &&
         google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude &&
         google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude)
    {
           map.setCenter(new google.maps.LatLng(google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude,
                                                             google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude), 13);
     }
}

Obviously you can implement various ways to determine the zoom level based on the city/state level info - but you get the idea. In my previous job, I have developed both IP and WiFi based location detection techniques that are being used in Virtual Earth/Live Maps today - I hope to see them open up those via APIs too.

Now the other method of detecting location based on radio stations (WiFi mostly) - this usually requires some kind of installation since browsers cannot access the radio stack by themselves and they need a handshake from some kind of a plugin to scan that information and provide it back to the browsers. Skyhook is the only commercial provider that is currently providing the tools/plug-ins to use this method today. Alternatively one can obtain a crowd-sourced database full of WiFi Hotspots and their locations and write the plugin layers on top of it. Either way the depth and recency of WiFi hotspot information determines the accuracy of the location information.

New release update on Center'd

We had a new release this morning on Center’d that included a set of new planning utilities as well as a number of upgrades to the existing features.

 

A detailed post on our official blog from Jen is up tonight. Obviously as a “local geek” and a former mapping guy, I would like to highlight the local search updates that Jen talked about:

 

“We also made some improvements to our local search to help you find the right places and service providers for whatever you might be looking for at this time of year (for our family, it was an orthodontist). Our search now combines aggregate ratings from across the web with the information and tags you and your friends have made on Center’d to provide even more relevant results.  If you are a Center’d member, do a search and you will see higher rankings for the places you and your friends have saved.  Want to make the results even better?  Save and tag the places you like.  I have saved everything from our pediatrician to our favorite car wash to help other people more easily find things they might like too. Give it a shot by connecting to a Center’d team member, and check out some of the places we like.”

 

Bringing local search into an actionable form is what we do at Center’d – in future you will see how we are going to integrate the personalized (or social) local search into planning tools in a more cohesive way. In the mean time, I would love it if you can give our planning tools and our search a try and send us feedback!

 

Chandu Thota

Co-Founder & CTO

http://www.centerd.com

 

Happy 61st Birthday, India!

Sixty one years of independent journey, which I'm sure is no match to thousands of years you spent in time before that, but here is to a brilliant 61 years and many more to come!

The meaning of meaninglessness

No creed or religion or system can explain the loss of innocent life. For many, including myself, this week has been one of those, that is filled with questions that never yield meaningful answers. I truly hope that the incidents in Bangalore and Ahemdabad this week represent an aberration but not a systematic flaw that is just surfacing in India.

No matter what it is, it does not make sense - hopefully it doesn't degenerate further so that we don't have to understand the meaning of this meaningless state to explain to our kids. 

 Photo credit goru30 @ flickr

Defining the "Experience"

So, I have been thinking (and working) about defining "experience" in the context of a web site or a web application, you know, like our Centerd.com and define the factors that influence it. More I think about it more deeper it gets in terms of where the experience starts and where it ends. People often think experience as the pure visual experience, while visual experience helps the over all experience, the real experience is not just what you see, but it is the whole thing. So I tried to come up with 5 factors that I think contribute to create a great experience and here is the quick summary:

1. Acceleration Factor

How fast can you get your user from 0-60? The second a user lands on your site, does he/she know what they can do, where to go and what to do and so on? What kind of words/images/anchoring techniques do you need to get them going fast? Clearly, messaging what benefit they get out of your application is the most important thing - and faster you get them to act on the primary task that they need to do better the experience is going to be.

2. Performance Factor

Okay, once the user figures out what to do on your site - then how quickly can they do it? In many cases its not an exaggeration to say that a great experience starts with a very fine tuned database query that runs very fast. So it is super critical to provide that level of performance to keep the user going at the same rate that they got started.

3. Consistency Factor

Once user does something on your site, how can they do more? So, consistency is about providing a way to parlay the experience the user had in one application context to another to move forward and do more things. So creating an environment where there is a consistent way of doing things helps greatly with the experience.

4. Reliability Factor

Reliability is about providing the same level of experience on 1, 2 and 3 over a series of visits and sessions - remember the term "it just works" or IJW? That's what it is about - how reliably you can deliver the promise that you made in the user's first visit.

5. Interface Factor

Finally, a good interface coupled with nice visuals improve the overall experience greatly - however, the real secret is in designing the interface bottom-up. Means you need to define the interface with 1, 2, 3 and 4 in mind and then build it ground up. So an interface is not an after thought - it is an integrated piece of the whole experience puzzle.

So, experience is something that one needs to consider very early on and define it as the first step - and also as you imagine great experiences are built from within (like iPhone multi-touch)!

So what do you think? Did I miss any other factors?

Meeting the expectations

Building a product from scratch is hard - and building it in a startup is extra hard (for all the obvious reasons you can think of); having said that one thing that I did learn from working on Virtual Earth at Microsoft and now at Center'd is that if you focus on meeting or exceeding the expectations of your users rest all is taken care of.

So how do you know if you are meeting the expectations of your users? Some times you have to 'listen' carefully (through analytics) and some times get it in your email (feedback emails) but some times though, you see the feedback publicly in blog posts, magazine articles and news letters, and we have been having our fair share of that with our "Local Planning" product that we launched a couple of weeks ago.

As Dan pointed out on our official blog we feel fortunate to have so many folks publicly talking about what we do. So thank you Erick, Erin, Michelle, Beverly and Susan, please keep the feedback coming!

Center'd in San Diego

As planned, some of us were in San Diego last weekend launching Center'd at the National PTA Conference. It was a

fantastic experience to be able to connect with parents and teachers from across the country and listen to them talk about their experiences on local planning; after all who else can understand the local planning better than parents and busy professionals? So we got tons great feedback (and some kudos!) - we are now back at our Center'd HQ and we have work cut out for us.

BTW, work is not the only thing we did while we were down in San Diego (even though we LOVE what we do) we also had a fun time at the Old Town Mexican - and yes, we discovered this wonderful restaurant using our own search tool! While we are at it, what are your favorites in San Diego? Tell us by saving them to your places on Center'd, we would like to explore them when we go back there again (and your friends will benefit from it too).

Off to San Diego

I'm off to San Diego tomorrow to attend the National PTA confernece where we will be showing newly launched product: Center'd. Local planning is a broken today and the pain particularly clear with busy adults and parents - so this is going to be a great avenue for us to get real feedback about how we can improve the experience and features.

Geeking with Scoble

As you probably know already, Center'd is live and today we visited the Scoble's at Half Moon Bay.

You can see the video here.

It was a fun (albeit long, an hour long) and insightful conversation about the state of online calendaring, social networks and maps.

And BTW, Scoble said that the 3 Amigos in Half moon bay is a great place (but sorry they don't have tequila) for a nice dinner! :)

 

 

PicLens - my new lens to browse rich media on the web

I have a new addiction these days - browsing the web using PicLens - if you don't know what it is, it is a browser plug-in that enables you to view rich content (such as photos and videos) on the web in an immersive way.

I was introduced to one of their co-founders last November '07 and that's how I came to know about it - at that time it only had the ability to browse photos - but more recently they added Youtube integration to search and watch videos - the quality of videos is not matching up to PicLens cool factor but the experience is way better than browsing Youtube directly. Now I exclusively use PicLens to view photos and videos online, now this result has an interesting implications: picLens is showing us a new way to navigate the web - as the technology matures and gets adopted for other types of content (I'm thinking local/maps), it starts disrupting the existing/known browsing models on the web (as a result disrupts the concept of page views, ads and so on...). That would be very interesting to see.

If they deliver up to their "mantra" of "think beyond the browser", which they have been so far, it is going to change the way we experience the web - and I must confess, PicLens is one of those companies that I make me wonder why I did not start that company :)  

Internet browsers that helped us understand the "Web" are already coming in our way to experience and realize the full potential of the Web. The world wide web is a much deeper and more richer than what our current browsers can show us; and for now, PicLens is my way of realizing that.

del.icio.us tags: PicLens, Web, Immersive Experience, Rich Media, Disruption

Google maps "explore"

Just happened to stumble upon a new feature on Google Maps called "explore".

To experience it, just go to:

http://maps.google.com then search for a location, say "Seattle, WA"

and it loads photos, popular searches and videos from around that location.

Very cool - this kind of data aggregation is interesting - but I was surprised that this content was "on" by default for me.

Nonetheless, it gets definitely interesting to see what others do with this kind of integration...

Talking with Jon Kleinberg

Had a great opportunity to sit and talk with the Dr. Jon Kleinberg today (also attended his session along with Dr. Eva Tardos last night @ Yahoo! HQ) about what we are up to at Centerd and how we are mixing the known social elements with other real-life entities that do not exist in other existing social networks today. While talking to him it occurred to me that how different entities can actually contribute to different threshold levels in the spread of social networks. If you haven't already you should really read up some of his publications, absolutely fascinating stuff!

Fatdoor is Center'd!

If you have been watching the blogosphere there were a number of blog entries that talked about the demise of fatdoor and how we are going away from local space. It's amusing to see people speculate about who we are and what we are doing. But some folks did get it right.  

The reality is that there are a couple of changes in the product name and the a little bit of execution (specifically about the way we wanted to connect people using whitepages data) from the old fatdoor days - mostly driven by the private alpha testing and our user feedback. More details on that are on the fatdoor blog and on the center'd blog.

Now, coming back to the point of we getting out of local: to set things straight, we are not getting out of local, if anything we are enhancing the local offering in multiple ways - to give you a little more detail, in more technical terms, we built fatdoor as a pure spatial index based system - now with center'd we take it a step further by extending the spatial index and coupling it with temporal index. What does it mean for our users? a well integrated system that gives ability to switch modes seamlessly from spatial (space based) to temporal (time based) while running our utility based applications. And one of those apps, the planning application, is being covered by TechCrunch this week.

But to tell you the truth, I'm flattered with the attention that is being paid to what we do :) but please stay tuned as I discuss more details on the applications and the sub-systems that we are building in coming days. And yes, also please sign-up for an invitation if you haven't already - we are very close to sending invitations.

Neighborhoods API from Urban Mapping

This morning I read a couple of blogs that reported the free neighborhood API from Urban Mapping. Neighborhood data is one of those public datasets that we all need but not really freely available. When I needed neighborhood data for my company, I went with one of the data vendors to license the dataset; and the dataset is far from complete but it does the job for me, for now.

So I was obviously excited to see this move from urban mapping folks and spent a little bit of time on their API to understand what is offered and I have to say that I'm disappointed with the offering; here is why:

1. No Geometry: The neighborhood API does not expose the neighborhood geometry - which is the polygon (also known as the shape data) data points that actually "define" the boundaries of the neighborhood. If I'm looking into integrating any neighborhood level data into my applications, I want the shape data, without that, the neighborhood data is useless.

2. Non-Standard Neighborhood IDs: This is not an issue with Urban Mapping API per se, but they expose neighborhood IDs that are proprietary to them. What we need is a standard-based way to identify neighborhoods, some sort of taxonomy you know. For example, the neighborhood that is identified as "17476" in Urban Mapping API is not the same neighborhood in some other dataset. So if I'm building a mashup with neighborhood data, I want it to be portable (more on the map APIs and portability later).

3. Lack of wire-format choices: This is not a serious limitation, but the API currently only supports SOAP. Brady has pointed this out in his post too. If you want serious adoption for your APIs, you need to either support multiple wire-formats (SOAP, REST, JSON) or provide toolkits (API libraries) for multiple platforms/languages. I'm sure the folks at Urban Mapping are working on this, but this is a deficiency they need to fill at some point.

While this is a good first step in the right direction, I'm not going to spend much time on this API, for now anyway.

What do you think? Do you think the data exposed by Urban Mapping is useful in your mashups? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Happy New Year

Wish you and your families a very happy and prosperous new year.

Looking back, 2007 was an eventful one for me: left Microsoft, co-founded a company, gathered a great team, previewed our product, raised funding, gained friends :), and had a baby! Of course, I also learned a great deal along the way and looking forward to more exciting sutff this year.

Happy new year everyone!