AOL Teams With Sheraton

AOL IS GETTING INTO THE hotel business--sort of. The Internet portal has created a co-branded site with Four Points by Sheraton, a budget hotel chain, that will give guests free access to AOL videos, news, music and other content. The new site is being tested at the Sheraton Manhattan Chelsea Hotel in New York before potential rollout. The co-branded site will appear as the Internet welcome page on computers in individual hotel rooms and on courtesy terminals in the lobby. In the Four Points' signature "Family Room," guests will also be able to watch AOL Video on a large TV screen connected to a PC. The partnership with Sheraton is the first time AOL has teamed up with a hotel chain to offer on-site online services.

Microsoft Teams With MTV To Push Local Search

MICROSOFT HAS TURNED TO MTV to tout its Windows Live Local Search, a new mapping and directory offering from MSN that's currently in beta testing. MTV Network's college-focused MTVu will work with Microsoft to produce the upcoming installment of "Quad Squad," a reality program in which business school students compete to create ad campaigns. The contestants of "Quad Squad"--who hail from rival schools Indiana University and the University of Illinois--will create, implement and measure marketing campaigns for Live Local Search. Live Local, which launched into beta testing in December of 2005, is MSN's local search and directory offering; it is monetized by MSN's adCenter, the company's paid search platform.

RealTravel Trip Planner: Cut, Paste & Share Travel Tips

Posted: 13 Oct 2006 03:19 AM CDT TECHCRUCH

RealTravel has come a long way since we first mentioned them in our Web 2.0 conference roundup last October. They now have very deep travel content - mostly written by users, and some from a recent partnership with Frommer's. The site has an active community of tens of thousands of frequent travelers who talk about their experiences and freely give their recommendations via blogs, forums, photos, etc.

Tomorrow RealTravel will annouce its new My Trip Plan tool, which can be found in the main navigation area. Travel content on the site includes an "add to My Trip Plan" button. Clicking this basically cuts and pastes the information into the My Trip Plan area along with a link to the original content, and this information can then be shared with others for discussion.

TripHub and Yahoo, among others, also offer good trip planning tools. RealTravel's new My Trip Planner actually falls short of those existing tools in terms of pure organizational features. However, the depth of content available from other travelers gives RealTravel a different kind of advantage. And while RealTravel can create better planning tools over time, it will be hard for competitors to compete with RealTravel's active traveling and content-creating community.

All the content on RealTravel (except the Frommer's Guide content) is drawn directly from user posts and photos that are categorized by location and type. Editors, with the help of some automated classification, and choose the cream of the crop to be featured on the site. Readers can also affect the ranking of posts by voting on them or implicity when they add the content to their trip plan. All this content populates the site's info on trip ideas, photos, blogs, dining reviews, sight reviews, useful links, and hotel reviews.

The blogging platform performs like any other blog (RSS included) except you catagorize by location and type (if it's a review or not) before you write up the entry. You can't drop drop images directly in a post, but instead associate some photos with it via an image gallery. You can print these photos out later using Qoop. Readers can comment on posts or leave questions in RealTravel's location specific forums.

RealTravel has accomplished all of this in just one year, and with only $1 million in angel funding. They are a poster-child for the way to run a lean web service, and I suspect a bigger round of financing, or acquisition, will come in the near future.

RealTravel : Technorati

tune into stations around the globe

This radio is a great one for travellers, language enthusiasts and those far away from home with a passion for radio from around the world. You'll be able to tune into thousands of stations and as the radio is digital, it'll all be crackle free. Not only that but this WiFi radio can access all your music on your PC without having to turn the computer on. Stations are listed alphabetically and you can use the preset to select up to 10 favourites. RRP £119.99

Mio H610 Personal Assistant SatNav

The Mio H610 isn't just any old personal assistant, it's a SatNav too with on foot and in car navigation with 24 European maps displayed on a 2.7 inch touch screen, a photo viewer an MP3 player with 17 hours of playback, video player, currency converters and games. Internal memory is 1GB but a SD/MMC card can add 4GB more At around the size of a pack of cards, it's definitely pocket friendly that way plus the two supplied covers are interchangeable, the one shown is a white flower design. It'll hit the shops in early November with a RRP of £269.99

Mio store locator

Acer e-Series GPS

It's not pink, but it is apparently the perfect size for our handbags (they clearly haven't seen the size of mine - I could fit a whole car in), so it can still be classed as GPS for Girls. Praise be! However, facetiousness aside, it is pretty tiny at 103 x 58.4 x 17.5 mm and weighing just 130 grams. It's also finger-friendly as opposed to stylus-stabbing, as well as loads of Points of Interests and decent maps. There's also an integrated MP3 player, and a photo viewer.

There are three models available. The e305 has UK maps and POI, the e310 has European maps, pedestrian mode and an AC-Adaptor and the e360 comes with live traffic information. Pricings yet to be released.

More car stuff: Navman F20| Hot Pink CarTrek| Barbie's

Smalltown and GrayBoxx

Smalltown and GrayBoxx: Two approaches to local search and two approaches to tapping the Yellow Pages gold mine

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Local search and local online commerce are the next battlegrounds for the giants such as Google and Yahoo, but also for many startup companies. The lure is the billions of dollars spent on Yellow Pages advertising by local businesses.

We have Yahoo Local and Google Local, plus Max Levchin's Yelp, CitySearch, Ingenio, plus local newspapers and other companies--all trying to grab a piece of the local search and local commerce ad spend.

But tapping into the local businesses market through online services is hard. The same factors that make scaling a global online service easy on the Internet become reversed when applied to local businesses.

For example, a local pizza parlor gets nearly all its business from within two miles of where it operates. Reaching China or even a neighborhood five miles away is something the Internet does well for many companies. But it doesn't make much sense for a local pizza parlour, and the same is true for most local businesses--they all nned to reach customers in their neighborhoods.

I recently spoke with two startups, Smalltown and Grayboxx, with two different approaches.

Smalltown targets neighborhoods and small communities

I was very impressed with Smalltown's approach to local search because of the elegant design and simplicity of the site. Simplicity is not easy to do but it is extremely vital in the online space.

Last week I spoke with Smalltown CEO Hal Rucker. "To succeed in local markets we belive that you have to be local," said Mr Rucker. "So we've created 'webcards' which are a type of virtual index cards with their own web address that can be created by anyone local, by a business or an individual."

An example of a webcard:

Webcards can be attached to each other, and also sent to people. They provide an easy to use template that allows busy, small business owners to create a web page about their business without having to have a website.

And the process is simple enough that any customer of a local business can create a webcard that acts as a recommendation, or a warning, by filling in text and adding photos.

"With webcards we are helping to build what we call the 'local web.' And it creates 'social advertising,'" said Mr Rucker.

The roll out of Smalltown will be town by town. The first two are San Mateo and Burlingame, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

If they can get the formula right, then they can reproduce it in other small towns and city neighborhoods.

Each Smalltown would have a local person/agent to help evangelize the service and also aid local businesses and people to produce webcards. Smalltown is =offering cash bounties to people of $5 per five webcards, a smart way to create a large inventory of webcards, which creates a potentially useful library of local content.

SVW's take: Smalltown has a great user interface and I love the concept of webcards, each with their own web address, each discoverable through the search engines, as well as the local Smalltown portal.

What I'd like to see with such approaches is a compelling front end, by which I mean a reason to go to the site even if I'm not actively searching for something local. What would draw me to it if I did not have a need to find something? I've got a couple of ideas...

Coming up next in SVW: Interview with Bob Chandra, founder and CEO of Grayboxx (still in stealth mode). This local search startup taps unseen databases to create ranked lists of top local businesses favored by their communities. . .