We are excited to present our first ever national exclusive deal from Crocs. You get 30% off any the entire purchases at any crocs store across the country (about 200 crocs locations in all).
You can see more about this deal on the web, on our iPhone app or our android app or on our local twitter feeds.
This offer is valid until Sunday night, so go pick up some crocs! :)
Super excited to announce the launch of The Dealmap Android application. Just like our iPhone application, this app is also built on the same set of APIs that we offer to our developer community. Please stay tuned for more stuff to come from us on the mobile front.
Here is a nice post from Venture Beat this morning on the launch:
Center’d is launching its Dealmap Android app today that will let users filter out the chaff and find the best deals nearby.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company says it can aggregate daily deals from almost 100 sources and put them all in one place. Center’d previously launched an iPhone app that has been downloaded more than 175,000 times in its first six weeks. The app sorts through more than 350,000 local deals and coupons and makes them available to consumers where they want them on web sites, social apps, daily emails and mobile apps. More than 375,000 people get these updates daily. It can filter 10 business categories and eight deal types.
Sifting through the chaff is a big part of daily life. If your mobile phone can help you do that, it will become an even more indispensable part of your life. If the Dealmap can help, then it may be a good tool for the discovery of what’s around you. Consumers and businesses can upload their own deals, so the company takes advantage of user-generated content. This app can aggregate daily deals from companies such as Groupon and Living Social. It then organizes the deals and maps them, using relevance algorithms.
Center’d has raised $10 million from Norwest Venture Partners and KeyNote Ventures. Angel investors include Bill Harris, former PayPal and Intuit chief executive. Competitors include 8coupons and Yipit, neither of which have a mobile app yet. Center’d was founded in 2007 and the Dealmap web site launched in May. The company has eight employees.
Nokia Replaces CEO with Microsoft Exec
Nokia has removed its CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, and replaced him with Microsoft executive Stephen Elop. Kallasvuo took the reigns from long-time CEO Jorma Ollila in 2006 and promised the reinvigorate the company's place in the U.S. market. Despite Kallasvuo's efforts, Nokia's share of the U.S. market has continued to decline. ...
Govt to carry out caste census next yearBowing to demands by several political parties, govt on Thursday decided to carry out a caste census next year. The exercise would be carried out independent of the ongoing census operation next year.
I am more optimistic on India than China: Vinod Khosla:
"I am more optimistic on India than China: Vinod KhoslaYou did not really have a technology background. You were in the forces. Your dad was in the Indian Army, and yet you moved into this line. What were your growing years like and what really motivated, what got you into ..."
The Dealmap: New Home Page Design & More Cities Added to Daily Deals Emails: "We've been hard at work over here at The Dealmap HQ and just unveiled a new home page redesign. After listening to customer feedback since we launched, we made the following enhancements to ..."
You can get it here form the Apple App Store. Would love to hear your feedback!
"While we suggested that the like had just replaced the link, it has now become abundantly clear what Facebook’s intentions are. Facebook wants to launch the social semantic search engine as we alluded to during f8. Now that the search results are officially showing up as Facebook search results, the war has begun."
Using "Like" as an input into relevance is a fine idea - but Facebook (or Twitter for that matter) are long ways away from building a full-blown search engine purely based on that data. Why do I say that? Fundamentally "Likes" are ambiguous, random and spam-prone (and impossible to detect). These are real big issues for any search engine to solve before they label themselves a search engine.
This utility is built for Windows based machines (with .NET 3.5) and is written in C#. If there is a need and if there is a community that is willing to build on top of what I have I don't mind posting it as an open source, but for now its closed source with extensibility model built into it. Think of HeatmapRenderer as a simple rendering engine you can plug-and-play different data sources to render from. Each data source will have its own adaptor - an adaptor is responsible for reading the latitude/longitude data by implementing a simple interface. HeatMapRender natively supports CSV adaptor, so if you can dump your geodata into a CSV file you can use the Heatmaprender instantly. I will write a follow-up on how to extend and write your own adaptors in my next post.<add name="us-starbucks"Once you add a config section as shown above, all you need to do to generate the heatmap tiles, is to type in a command like below:
sourcetype ="HeatMapRenderer.Sources.SimpleCSVSource, HeatMapRenderer.Sources"
sourceconnectionstring="sampledata\starbucks.csv"
sourcearguments="0,1"
palettefilepath="palette\palette.bmp"
pointradius="5"
minmaplevel="1"
maxmaplevel="10"
outpath="map-tiles\us-starbucks">
</add>
HeatmapRenderer.exe us-starbucksAs you can see its very straight forward, here is a bit more about the config values:
name = unique name so that you can identify and run the tile generation job.
sourcetype = This is the source adaptor. If you have a CSV file, then you can use the built in CSV source adaptor, and of course you can build your own adaptor too (more on that later)
sourceconnectionstring = points to the CSV file (or if you have a MySql data source this should be the connection string etc);
sourcearguments = if you have a CSV you identify lat/long column index values - you can use this field to send any data that is required for your own adaptor.
palettefilepath = default heatmap palette - you can generate your own palette if needed (the download has a palette file included)
pointradius = default 5pixels. you can reduce or increase the point radius based on your scenarios.
minmaplevel = usually 1. levels map to google maps zoom levels. so 1 is very very high-level map (at world map level)
maxmaplevel = usually determined by your app. but in this case 10. around 15 if you want some-what street level heatmaps
outpath = where to store the heatmap tiles generated - local disk path
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));That's it!
map.setMapType(G_NORMAL_MAP);
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(38.86252601314520,-76.96975322980910), 2);
var myCopyright = new GCopyrightCollection("© Chandu Thota");
myCopyright.addCopyright(new GCopyright('Chandu Thota', new GLatLngBounds(new GLatLng(-90,-180), new GLatLng(90,180)), 0,'2010 chanduthota.com'));
var gtl = new GTileLayer(myCopyright);
gtl.getTileUrl = function(tile,zoom) {
var t = "http://<your host tile path>/" + zoom + tile.x + tile.y + ".png";
return t;
};
gtl.isPng = function() { return true;};
gtl.getOpacity = function() { return 0.5; }
var tilelayer = new GTileLayerOverlay(gtl);
map.addOverlay(tilelayer);
<iframe height="100px" scrolling="no" src="http://widgets.thedealmap.com/carousel/?lat=37.3165&lon=-121.874&d=8&width=420" style="border: 0px;" width="450px"></iframe>
Last week when Scoble made the argument that the Goby and The Dealmap are more important than Foursquare, Gowalla and others, the reaction was mixed. In his post, Scoble said:
“why did I say these are more important than Foursquare or Gowalla or the other companies in this space? Well, normal people are still resisting using these location services. But these [The Dealmap & Goby] offer REAL utility and REAL value...”
Nearly everyone missed the point; some bloggers even posted rebuttal like the one here, in which they said:
“The lack of gaming function in Goby or TheDealMap does not render them useless nor uncool nor nonfunctional, just not very fun. We all like useful tools but we love to play games and have fun! And that’s why Goby and TheDealMap are not nearly as important as Foursqaure and Gowalla”
See, its not really about which product is “more important” – the way I read it (and of course also based on my full 3 hr discussion with Scoble) is that Fun and Utility are the most important facets of any product. The role that’s played by a product in ones daily life is decided by how Fun AND Useful that product is.
In other words, Game mechanics promote frequency of actions and Utility aspects add value to those actions – they are simply the Yin and Yang of a successful product. The products that mix these two aspects in just right proportions cross the chasm to have a lasting effect.
And doing that is not that easy, its the perfect combination of art & science that’s hard to achieve!
Photo Credit: Exhibit-M
It was all over the news yesterday about how Starbucks Free WIFI is going to change the way we connect to Internet, so I got curious and generated a "Starbucks Free WIFI Heatmap" based on all Starbucks stores in the United States. The resulting map is seriously stunning, take a look at the image below:
There is a live version running on my machine (will try to upload to my site later for you to play) and I can see how this is gonna make some cities go "WiMax" without actually having "WiMax" :)
We have been busy at The Dealmap HQ working on more ways to get you the local deals in ways that's convenient for you. As part of this push we are launching local deal feeds for top cities and The Dealmap widgets .
To get a feed for your city, simply go to our local deals directory and pick your city. Then select the type of feed you need (Restaurants vs. Daily Deals) - then simply add "/rss" at the end and add that url in your favorite feed reader!
For example to get all daily deals in San Jose, you would subscribe to: http://www.thedealmap.com/cities/san-jose-ca/daily-deals/rss
Similarly, to get all restaurant deals in Seattle, you would subscribe to: http://www.thedealmap.com/cities/seattle-wa/restaurant-deals/rss
You can also get local deals in widgets for your site with a single line of simple HTML code. Simply visit The Dealmap Widget maker page and pick a theme/design/size that suites your blog! We have pre-selected some standard IAB sizes so that its easier for you to integrate into your blog/site. Below is a sample widget and the code required to install it:
| <iframe height='260px' width='310px' style='padding:0px;border:0px' src='http://widgets.thedealmap.com/?l=Seattle%2c+WA&h=250&w=300&t=black&lcid=1033'></iframe> |
It's that simple!
We are working on more ways to get your favorite deals - so stay tuned. And of course, these widgets are built on top of our own Dealmap APIs - so you can build a custom widget yourself if you are a tinkerer!
Today is a sad day for me and many other mapping geeks that tinker with online mapping and connecting people through it. Platial is going offline. I have been a huge fan of Platial project and Di-Ann and the team from the very beginning.
I was still at Microsoft, with the Virtual Earth team, when they launched the service and I had the opportunity to share my thoughts with Annalee from Wired on their launch; my thoughts haven't changed much since then - just like rest of the mapping community, I'm still very excited and optimistic about mixing local and social.
Platial team was truly on the forefront of the local-social experiments online and I'm sure we will see many many more from their team in future!
