Local Services for Everyday People

Thumbtack Takes On RedBeacon As It Looks To Bring Local Service Providers Online

Posted at TechCrunch: 25 Nov 2009 02:25 PM PST

Last month we saw the launch of TechCrunch50 winner RedBeacon, the startup that lets you book local service providers directly from the web. Today it's getting some strong competition from a new startup called Thumbtack, a local service booking engine that's looking to offer both a comprehensive directory of providers and a greater degree of trust than you can find elsewhere.

Featurewise, Thumbtack is a mix between RedBeacon, Yelp, and OpenTable. Like RedBeacon, it lets you sign onto the site and issue a request for a service, which service providers can then bid on. CEO Marco Zappacosta says this portion of the service is nearly identical to RedBeacon, complete with a bidding engine for providers to set pricing. But Thumbtack also offers provider profiles, where these providers can list some of their specialties and price points. There's also a section where you can book a service directly from a profile page as you would on OpenTable, complete with an availability calendar.

One of the biggest issues with local services like Thumbtack is the chicken-and-the-egg problem. These sites generally launch with a relatively small number of services, which means that users can have a hard time finding what they need (and without users, providers have little incentive to join the site). Thumbtack has tried to address this by spending the last year recruiting providers – at launch, the startup says it already has 10,000 of them, ranging from tutors and handymen to rap teachers and henna artists. Thumbtack is also using some clever incentives to get companies to sign up, like offering discounted business cards and other marketing materials. Zappacosta explains that Thumbtack can order these goods in bulk because they work with so many companies, and then pass the savings on to businesses that sign up.

The other big issue with this kind of site is the creepiness factor – many of these services involve inviting these people into your home (say, to fix a sink) or to a private event (wedding caterers). Along with user reviews, which are standard for this space, Thumbtack is taking a few extra steps. If a service provider is licensed they can post that in their profile, which Thumbtack will verify for free. Thumbtack is also giving providers a handful of premium verification options, such as electing to undergo a background check by a national agency (prices vary from $8 to $49 depending on the level of verification). Providers who successfully pass these checks are rewarded with badges on their profile pages, giving users more confidence in their service. Every provider is also run through the DOJ sex offender registry.

Thumbtack plans to make money by building a payment system off of PayPayl's adaptive payments API. They'll take a cut out of each transaction that occurs on the site, and for services that require in-person estimates (like plumbing) they'll take a lead-gen payment. They'll also be taking a cut every time a provider elects to get verified through one of the third party background check services. Thumbtack is offering its service nationwide beginning today, but as with RedBeacon their primary focus is the Bay Area, with plans to expand down the road.

Thumbtack is doing a lot of things right with its site – I particularly like the idea of having providers verified through background checks, which helps differentiate it from sites like Angie's List, Craigslist, and RedBeacon (which lets providers display their licenses but doesn't do background checks). That said, Thumbtack faces the same challenges that RedBeacon will have. For one, it's going to have to train users to turn to their computers rather than their yellow pages for these local services. And while 10,000 businesses is a good start, it's going to take a long time for the service to build up a robust community of users and reviews. The background checks are a nice touch, but they don't do much for helping users discern which providers offer a high quality service.

For another service that's taking a different approach to matching users with trustworthy service providers, check out Workstir, which provides suggestions based on your social graph.

On The Mark

More Details On SimpleGeo, The AWS For Location

by Jason Kincaid on November 19, 2009

This morning at Under the Radar, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan are taking the stage to unveil SimpleGeo, their new infrastructure for location based services. We've been following the company over the last few months and uncovered some basic details earlier, but this marks the first time the founders are talking about the company in public.

SimpleGeo is akin to an 'Amazon Web Services' for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them. The startup originated as a gaming company, but after spending four months building out their location platform, Stump and Galligan realized they had stumbled across an opportunity: location is soon going to become an expected feature in many applications, and there's no reason developers should have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to include the feature. SimpleGeo is looking to do it for them.

I spoke with Galligan last night, who says that one of the ways SimpleGeo could help spur radical change in location based services has to do with real-time (incidentally, he'll be speaking at our Real-Time CrunchUp tomorrow). Galligan says that the technologies currently used to process real-time data can't cope with the rapid read/write operations required as a LBS scales. In other words, these technologies simply weren't built with real time in mind (he says this is one reason why companies like Foursquare have partitioned their users by city). SimpleGeo, Galligan says, was built from the ground up to support real-time on a much broader scale.

SimpleGeo is currently in a private beta (you can apply to join from a form on their homepage), with plans to roll out broadly early next year. The service will be available for free to apps just getting started, and paid packages will kick in as they hit scale (the more API calls you use the more you'll pay).

For more details, check out the slides below.

Agents use 12 sites at any one time, finds Travelport study

Travel agents are switching between an average of 12 applications and websites at any one time according to Travelport.

The company discovered that agents were using hotel, destination, weather and a host of other travel related sites and applications during focus groups and feedback from the seven partners piloting its Universal Desktop technology.

Travelport plans to move its Universal Desktop technology, which aims to aggregate the services agents need on one screen, into beta next April.
The Universal Desktop prototype, unveiled last February, combines search, booking and tracking capability with productivity tools on one screen.

Other features include e-mail, instant messenger, links to favourite websites and travel widgets.

Travelport portfolio director Jason Nash said the pilot phase was to ensure the company was ticking all the boxes in terms of helping agents become more productive.

"We've got to make sure it meets their needs in terms of the different roles they play in the agency."

The first release of the service aims to offer flight booking capability as well as hotel, rail and car-hire in half the time it would traditionally take to book just the flight.

Nash also said that elements such as instant messenger would be integrated in future releases of the technology, although the first version would include internet links and the ability to e-mail itineraries to travellers.

In April, Travelport will extend the service to between 25 and 30 agencies across all locations.

Kayak makes travel search trend data available

Kayak has opened access to the site's travel search data and launched a travel demand benchmark, providing an open source of travel statistics and information from hundreds of millions of travel searches.

Trends data is available for nearly any commercial airport in the world and for hotels in hundreds of the most searched destinations. The company also launched a proprietary travel demand benchmark, the Kayak Travel Index, a statistical model that provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on Kayak sites by modeling data for the average combined hotel and flight prices that people select.

Paul English, Kayak CTO and co-founder said, "people have conducted hundreds of millions of travel searches on Kayak in the past year, generating a tremendous amount of data on travel demand trends." English continued, "we're happy to make this information available to the travel press and to the general public."

Kayak Chief Scientist, Giorgos Zacharia, an accomplished expert in predictive modeling, who developed the Kayak Travel Index™ added, "the index essentially models how much an average traveler is willing to pay to visit a given destination by analyzing search behavior and selection patterns across all destinations searched on Kayak sites."

Related Link: Kayak Trends

How to Take a Google Vacation

Street View Sightseeing

Everyone needs a vacation every now and then, but we don't always have the time to take one when we really need it most. But, if sightseeing is what you like to do for fun, there is no reason why you can't take a vacation from the comfort of your own home.

One bit of fun you can have with Google Maps Street View is to go on a virtual sightseeing tour. Through Street View Sightseeing, you can walk down Broadway in New York, or stare out at the ocean in San Fransisco.

To get you started, I've picked out some neat locations using Google Street View. Just plug in the Google address and take a look for yourself. If you are unfamiliar with Street View, you can learn how to use it by taking a walk down your street.

Images 1-8 of 8

Enter Gallery

Street View Sightseeing - The Hollywood Sign	Street View Sightseeing - Golden Gate Bridge	Street View Sightseeing - Radio City Music Hall	Street View Sightseeing - Baha'i House of Worship
Street View Sightseeing - Las Vegas Strip	Street View Sightseeing - The Alamo	Street View Sightseeing - Salt Lake Temple	Street View Sightseeing - Marys Lake

From Another source

August 11, 2009

TRAVELGROVE META SEARCH ENGINE REVIEW

http://www.travel-plan-idea.com/archives/004839.html

The following is a paid review.

When I first heard of Travelgrove I was reminded of Kayak because it was described as "a meta search engine that helps its users find the best deals on airfares, hotel rentals, car rentals, cruise deals and vacation packages."

I don't believe you can search for all that on Kayak so I was looking forward to a more comprehensive travel search engine when I started trying it out. I went to the vacation search engine, which I presumed would include flight + hotel packages and searched for a trip from JFK to Prague Sept. 18-25.

The results were pretty disappointing. There were some unrelated travel deals (for example Flight from Boston (BOS) to New York City (JFK) from $79). There were some hot deals and I thought the first must be related to my search: $219 & up -- Europe on Sale this Fall on Lufthansa. The other hot deals were not really close though. For example one was $625 & up -- Caribbean Iberostar Vacations w/Air, $150 OFF.

There was a button encouraging me to search Travelocity, Hotwire travel-ticker, and Bookingbuddy. But Travelgrove itself gave me no useful results.

I next went to the travel guides section, and figured I'd review the one on South Korea since I think of myself as kind of an expert. I was expecting something more detailed but the information I found was very general in nature. I don't think anyone could begin planning a vacation with this travel guide. They list a few tourist attractions but there's really not much there for travelers to read.

I next went to the community, thinking it would be a message board. They seem to be encouraging travel journals more than forums although the one I clicked on was actually a few sets of pictures (Salzburg and Vienna). I did see a link for forums but I got an error message so I was never able to check them out. Perhaps when they're fixed I can edit this review to include something on the forum community.

Set-top productions

Coronation Street goes on Google Street View

 Coronation Street is to become the first fictional location to appear on Google Street View.

The soap's producers have invited one of the site's camera cars to drive down the famous cobbles and take pictures of the set.

Fans will be able to explore the street virtually and take in well-known landmarks such as the Rovers Return, the hairdresser's and Rita's paper shop, The Kabin.

An ITV spokesman said: "Thanks to Street View, fans will be able to have a good nose around the set in a way that would have been unimaginable almost 50 years ago when the show first aired."

Linking it all up

An App To Show You Mastercard "Priceless" Deals: Priceless.

Posted: 17 Jul 2009 12:49 PM PDT

When I first heard that Mastercard was releasing an iPhone app called "Priceless Picks," I thought for sure it would be a lame gimmick. But I must admit, it's actually a kind of cool gimmick.

If you've ever watched TV, you've undoubtedly seen at least a dozen of the Mastercard "Priceless" ads. You know the ones, "So and so consumer items: $5. Such and such memorable moment paid for with your Mastercard: Priceless." Yeah, now there's an app for those.

Well not exactly. It's not like this app is limited to the priceless moments mentioned in the commercials, that would be kind of pointless. Instead this is a social app that allows consumers to point out their best deals at their favorite local spots for all to see. The app uses the iPhone location services to figure out where you are. It then shows you on a map and shows all the deals others have placed around you.

That may sound bland and obvious, but the app is actually done in a really nice way. You can choose either a bird's eye view of the deals around you on the map, or get a more street-view like look (though, sadly, it doesn't use the iPhone 3GS' new compass to move the map when you move). If you tap on any of the color-coded bubbles, you zoom into that specific deal and can tap to get more info about it.

You can also flag the deal is "improper" or send it to a friend, all without leaving the app. It also tells you when (if ever) the deal expires.

If you want to add you own deal, you simply click the "+" button, and enter the relevant details. It will tag the place at whatever your current location is.

So will anyone actually use this app? Who knows. But if Mastercard starts promoting it on their annoyingly effective commercials, I could certainly see a bunch of tourists picking up this app to find some deals in whatever city they happen to be in.

The best part of this "priceless" app is that it really is price-less, as in, free. Find it here.

book it danno

Dopplr launches iPhone app anyone can use, but where's Add Trip?

5 Comments

by Mike Butcher on July 16, 2009

Dopplr has launched an iPhone app they are billing as a "social atlas". Curiously, and possibly wisely, you don't even need an account at Dopplr to use the app, meaning it will get exposed to a lot more potential users. However, a let down from the get-go is that you can't add upcoming trips from within the app right now, which is kinda the point with Dopplr, as it's users will attest. Hopefully that feature will be out soon. Till then if you want to add trips on mobile people can use the site, twitter, SMS or email in the usual manner, of course.

The app appears first on the iPhone, but apps for Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android platforms are planned. The app is available from the iTunes store here. But for Dopplr users it's going to be a real boon. The app puts the combined knowledge of your Dopplr network into an app which can tell your location, while allowing users to upload reviews themselves. There is also a built-in directory of city tips and advice. Plus, as usual, see where your network is about to travel to so you can plan accordingly. Users can also contact eachother directly from inside the app. There is plenty of content inside the app pulled from Dopplr's own content as well as your social network.

The question mark with Dopplr is how it will continue to fair against Tripit, which is tearing along at a fast pace and recently launched premium flight monitoring and alerts.

Touring About

Google Dips Its Toe Into Travel Space With City Tours

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by Jason Kincaid on June 24, 2009

Google has just debuted the latest entry to its fleet of Labs products, introducing the search giant to the travel space. Dubbed City Tours, the new site can build itineraries for brief trips to locations around the globe in a matter of seconds. At this point details on the new product are fairly sparse — it looks like Google hasn't written its customary blog post yet, but given how basic the product is it's pretty easy to figure out how it works.

Getting started is incredibly easy — just type in where you're visiting (say, San Francisco or London), and Google will present a suggested itinerary spanning a three day trip, with around a dozen attractions per day depending on the city. From there you can change the number of days you'll be staying (Google will show more attractions the longer you stay), and you can also manually adjust the list of places you'd like to visit. You can add a new attraction by entering its name in a text field, and Google will try to find it in its database. All attractions include a star rating, along with its hours operation and location.

For the most part adding attractions works pretty well (which is going to be key given that you can't expect Google to predict everything you'll want to see). It managed to find the London Eye perfectly, and it even figured out that Platform 9¾ was located at the King's Cross Rail Station. That said, it isn't perfect: a search for Hyde Park directed me to a nearby hostel, which I suppose would have gotten me there but probably isn't the ideal result.

Perhaps the coolest part of the new product is the way it uses Google Maps to figure out which locations are closest to each other. Rather than simply present a list of places Google thinks you might want to check out, the site will logically order them according to where they're located, minimizing the travel time between each.

Given its status as a Labs product this shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but there are still a few kinks in City Tours. For one, I am apparently unable to remove events from my suggested itinerary (I've tried in both Firefox and Safari with the same issue). Likewise, sometimes when I click on the name of a location nothing happens. And it badly needs support for Google Transit, which can automatically route you across town using public transportiation — my London tour included a 99 minute walk that would have only been a couple minutes away had I ridden on the Tube.

In the mean time, there are plenty of other travel sites that offer similar (and in many cases, more robust) functionality than Google's City Tours, including TC50 finalist GoPlanit, Offbeat Guides, and Zicasso.

Booking yourself

BookFresh Is OpenTable For Everything Else Posted at TechCrunch: 24 Jun 2009 11:57 PM PDT In the online reservation space, you probably know about OpenTable. The restaurant reservation service's IPO in a time of drought for IPOs, made big headlines. Now imagine OpenTable for just about everything besides restaurants. That's BookFresh. Who might need such a service? A lot more services and individuals than you may realize. While most services have some sort of scheduling system, many aren't optimized, and can't adapt on the fly to openings/changes. Massage therapists, dentists, doctors are all perfect examples of who could use such a system, founder Ryan Donahue tells us. He notes that health and beauty has been a particularly hot area. He knows that because the service has actually been around for a little while, but it was formerly know as HourTown. But BookFresh is a much better name for the service because, "appointments are much like produce items in a grocery store, it's a perishable thing," Donahue says. And a name change isn't all that in-store for users. BookFresh wants to be the main platform for all online appointment booking on the web. As such, they've created APIs to let developers of sites take advantage of their tools. But you don't have to be a developer to implement the service, anyone can do it with a simple line of code added to their site. This is important because a lot of people BookFresh is targeting are one-person or small operations, that probably don't have a web development team. Donahue likens the idea of BookFresh as an appointment platform to PayPal as a payment platform. (And he should know, he used to work at PayPal — incidentally with Jeffrey Jordan, the CEO of OpenTable.) He notes that just like a lot of sites out there don't want to go through the hassle of building their own payment system, they also don't want to have to make an online booking system. Sure, it's not as complex, but it's still a hassle — and might as well be impossible for little shops/services. And BookFresh offers some nice things with its platform. One is the ability for businesses that use it to get calls when a customer is requesting an appointment time. From your phone, you can opt to accept or decline the request. That's perfect for someone like a plumber, who may be always on the go and not able to get to a computer to confirm appointments. And the offers easy integration with Google Calendar and iCal to place appointments in your own personal calendars automatically when you accept them. Alongside the name change, BookFresh is announcing a partnership with Webs.com, one of the largest sites for building free websites out there. A lot of small business owners are already using it, and now they'll have one click access to install BookFresh if they choose to. In terms of monetization, the service is free for the end user, but businesses/individuals who wish to use it will pay a month fee that starts at $19.95. If larger sites choose to sign-on, there are other deals such as revenue sharing that can take place. In terms of competition, there is Appointment-plus, but their service forces you back to their servers to handle everything. BookFresh's platform allows users to stay on the page they are already on to set everything up, Donahue says. One service that BookFresh won't be competing with is OpenTable. They have no interest in getting into the restaurant space, Donahue says.

...

Ex-Googlers Try To Create A Better Travel Guide With Nextstop Posted: 08 May 2009 01:10 PM PDT Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide. The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn't gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham's. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. "It is difficult to discover something new when you don't know what to look for," says Sjogreen. Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city, a guide view, or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour), which can be explicitly "liked" by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing. But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets areputation score. You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they "like" one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends. The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard. And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn "badges" for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets. The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation. Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking "add a recommendation." It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac, and it found it immediately, along with a great picture. There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr, Offbeat Guides and TripSay. But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit.

Sustainability's last public gasp

The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism

Thank God for Tech Moguls Who Redistribute VC Wealth So We Can Cybersocialize Freely. For Now, That Is.

by Simon Dumenco 

Published: May 04, 2009

Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone should thank God it was just a cardinal, and not the pope.

Last week, according to the Times of London, Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland told the country's Catholics to "Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, Twitter or e-mail every day. Such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another."

LET US PRAY: Cardinal Sean Brady wants you to tweet for Jesus.

Photo Credit: Niall Carson

Oh, my. That's a nice sentiment, but Twitter really doesn't need more users around the world tweeting in ways that can never be monetized. Ireland's got just 4 million Catholics, but the Vatican counts more than a billion baptized Catholics worldwide. If the pope endorsed tweeting prayer, Twitter could be out of business by the end of the year! The 3-year-old company, remember, still lacks a revenue model and just burns through more venture capital every time a new user signs up. (Fortunately, given how retro-conservative Pope Benedict is, he seems more likely to issue a papal encyclical condemning Twitter. We all know it's more likely to enable sin -- pride! sloth! -- than piety.)

It's telling that Cardinal Brady grouped Twitter with texting and e-mail. The former, of course, is a paid service and a massive profit center for cellular carriers around the world, and the latter you also pay for, albeit indirectly, as a service bundled with your monthly internet access or by allowing yourself to be subjected to advertising. (As a Gmail user, I decided to see what would come up when I e-mailed myself the Lord's Prayer. The ads Google served included ones for BeliefNet and Don Helin's paperback pulp thriller "Thy Kingdom Come." Ka-ching!) But when it comes to Twitter, we not only don't pay, but we all take it for granted that somebody's going to keep footing the bill for the rapidly expanding server farms needed to process and store zillions of tweets per minute.

It's sweet, really, that venture capitalists have ponied up millions so that we can all keep tweeting. It's also more than a bit scary. Because more and more of us are increasingly addicted not only to Twitter, but to other services that lack workable business models. What happens if the "dealers" who feed our habits disappear? (It's been known to happen. Last week, for instance, Yahoo announced it was shutting down last century's hot social-networking-esque service, GeoCities, for which it paid $3.5 billion in 1999.)

I've been thinking about all this a lot since I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how Susan Boyle has been on what I called the "Google Dole" -- her fame fueled in a nonsensically nonprofit manner by Google's YouTube unit, which hemorrhages cash serving up too much video with nowhere near enough advertising support. (I'll again refer you to Benjamin Wayne's Silicon Alley Insider piece, "YouTube is Doomed,"which deconstructed the recent Credit Suisse report that puts YouTube's estimated 2009 losses at nearly half a billion dollars.) You'd think a clip of Boyle singing a song from "Les Misérables," one of the most popular musicals of all time, on one of the most popular TV shows in the world would be semi-monetizable. (I mean, geez, at the very least stick a pop-up overlay on that video with a link to the "Les Miz" soundtrack on iTunes.) But no. Adam Ostrow at Mashable further proved my point with his piece, "Susan Boyle Video Profits: $0," which explained that disagreement between "Britain's Got Talent" owner ITV and YouTube over pre-roll vs. overlays prevented ad placements in Boyle's YouTube streams.

And then last week The New York Times reported about the hazards of international expansion for the likes of Facebook. Getting million of new users in the Third World, it turns out, really sucks, because Facebook will never really be able to meaningfully monetize those eyeballs. It's tons of cash out (bandwidth, data storage, personnel) with little hope of cash in.

Weirdly, some of the management at these companies don't even seem to be trying that hard to make money -- a consequence, perhaps, of still being awash in millions of dollars of VC money ("venture charity," as I like to call it). In fact, Abbey Klassen, Ad Age's digital editor, tells me that she once heard a Facebook exec joke to an agency exec, "Didn't you know we're a nonprofit?"

I'll go one step further: They're socialists! OK, yes, I'm using the dumbed-down definition of socialism championed by numbskulls like Sarah Palin, but regardless of the finer points of economic theory, you've got to admit that at some level the boys at Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are actively choosing to redistribute the wealth. They're taking money from venture capitalists and deploying it so that millions of people far beyond Silicon Valley can get something for nothing. Entertainment, information, and self-marketing opportunities, mostly.

And, oh yeah, a sense of "connectedness" -- cyber companionship -- which makes this particular era of VC-wealth distribution all the more ... touching. (Let's all be friends -- on someone else's dime! Let's all be perpetually jacked into the hyper-insta-now global hivemind of human consciousness -- for free!)

I am so appreciative. Seriously. I love YouTube, I've made some interesting connections through Facebook, and I enjoy Twittering. (Last week, for instance, I tweeted about an astonishing bit of information I came across in Britain's Daily Telegraph: YouTube "reportedly uses as much bandwidth as the entire internet took up in 2000.")

But I also know it can't go on like this. The digital Robin Hoods can't keep redistributing the wealth forever, because eventually the wealth runs out. Investors get sick of propping up private ventures that don't have viable business models, and shareholders of public companies, like Google, get cranky about flushing cash down the drain.

So what can we do? Not much, I suppose, other than enjoy it while it lasts -- and maybe twitter a prayer for VCs everywhere.

~ ~ ~
Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco

Getting to the point

Have Kindle, Will Travel — And Stay Up-To-Date Thanks To Offbeat Guides

Posted: 26 Apr 2009 10:00 PM PDT

I used to think the Kindle was stupid. Then I bought one and realized I was wrong. It's still way too expensive, but it's great at what it does. And what it does keeps on expanding. Now, it takes a step into the up-to-date travel guide market, with a partnership with the customizable travel guide service, Offbeat Guides.

Starting tomorrow, you'll be able to find 500 of the company's newest guides in the Kindle store at prices ranging from $3.99 for smaller cities to $7.99 for larger ones. Here's why these are great. Just like the Offbeat Guides regular guidebook products, its Kindle-ready guidebooks are way more up-to-date than traditional guidebooks. While there have been some guidebooks available on the Kindle in the past, most are only updated once a year. Offbeat Guides are updated every month.

This means they can include information such as real-time events for specific cities, like concerts or festivals. It also means the guides can have a Kindle menu option to find out something going on in the city you are visiting that night. For tourists who don't know anyone in a particular city, that's a great feature.

There are a couple downsides. Naturally, because the Kindle only handles grayscale images, you won't get the full color pictures you usually find in other tour guides. And because the Kindle's screen isn't ideal for displaying maps, tailored, local maps that are a part of Offbeat Guides regular guides aren't included here.

But, at 10.2 ounces (for the latest version), the Kindle is likely lighter than regular tour guides. And, if you're planning a multiple city trip, you can obviously load up a bunch of these guides on one Kindle. One thing that particularly excites me is the fact that you can also view these on your iPhone if you go somewhere and don't feel like carrying around a Kindle. Because the Kindle app on the iPhone stays in sync with the Kindle content, you can bookmark pages and look at them later on your phone.

Offbeat Guides has been working on these Kindle-tailored guides for 6 months now, CEO Dave Sifry tells me. He also notes that there are 5 times as many cities available as compared to other guides. Right now, if you plan on traveling to a city often and want the most up-to-date guide, you'll have to buy a new one each time. But Sifry says they will explore the possibility of having subscriptions for certain cities if customers demand that. Such a feature may even be useful to locals of a particular city to know what is going on. But the focus right now remains on leisure and business travelers, he says.

Find a full list of the Offbeat Guides Kindle options here.