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."