We have put together a quick intro video, explaining what Mappr is and a bit about our Group concept:

Mappr shows you the most interesting places around you. It’s based on the idea that you and your friends’ activity on Foursquare and other location-based services says a lot about the world around us. The more you and your friends are checking into places and leaving tips, the better we can surface interesting places you might not know about.

Our iPhone app lets you see Foursquare places on the map, prioritized in a way that reduces clutter and surfaces the best in any map view. Zoom out to see the top places in the whole city, zoom in to see everything right around you. Filter on category to find exactly what you are interested in.

Adding something new to your check-ins

When you check in with Mappr, you still check in with Foursquare (assuming you have hooked up your account!), so you will still earn your badges and hold down your mayorships. But unique to Mappr, with any check-in, you can check in with a group.

But with Mappr, whenever you check in, you can also add a group to the check-in. We’ve got groups for all kinds of interests, from sports to food, fishing to rock climbing. And you can create your own groups based on whatever it is that you are interested in.

With these group check-ins, we’ve got one more great piece of info to help find the best places around. Use the group filter to find places with group check-ins, where other people have tagged places for that group.

All of these great places can be found on our website as well. It’s perfect to quickly see the hottest places around, and as we get to know you (algorithmically at least!), it won’t be just the hot places, but the places that are interesting for you.

How can I use Mappr?

Download the iPhone app here. The website is http://map.pr.!

We are working to support Facebook, with check-ins and seeing your friends. But for now, you can post your check-ins to Facebook or Twitter.

Why does it not do x? Can you do y?

We are aware of the limitations currently! We really wanted to get it out to you quick, and hear back on what you like and hate. So apologies for anything that is off, or completely borked. We would love to hear anything, you can submit feedback here, or mail us at feedback AT map.pr!

It’s been great to check out the Mappr leaderboard and see how different teams have been supported through Mappr checkins. We’re not exactly at Foursquare’s usage levels, but seeing some activity is fantastic!

Overall, there’s not much surprise that the USA leads the pack in team checkins. As the home of Foursquare, Twitter, and the biggest hub of social media, Team USA benefited from this active user base.

And obviously, the longer your team stuck around, the higher they rank. Picking up “back up team supporters” never hurts! So going into the last weekend, Spain and Holland will certainly pick up some ground, but will it be enough to break past the USA?

From my glance, the only real surprise in the top 10 is Australia. Sure, they are English speaking, and everyone loves to drink with them, but does that explain their position? Of course, with our small userbase, it may just be one Bruce who really loves his team.

While the global stats are interesting, far more fun is looking at the Nearby leaderboard. For this, we use a 15KM radius from the center of your map viewport to calculate team checkins.

New York is way ahead of the rest of the pack. Here is a view showing all the places there that had a least 1 team checkin.

Stockholm and London were also pretty active.

So, what happens come Monday and the World Cup is over? Besides football withdrawl symptoms, of course…

We are hard at work at Mappr to bring out our next release, which will replaces the existing teams with more flexible groups. You will be able to create your own group, or check in with existing ones. Groups can be anything you want them to be: it can be for your social circle, for rock climbing enthusiasts, “real sushi” lovers (that’s you, @Scoble), whatever!

Check in with a group, that’s all that is needed to tags it so others can find it easily. Its really the easiest way to add lots of value to your checkin. No need for writing a full tip or a review, just add a group when checking in, 2 clicks and done!

So this version will be ready sometime at the end of July. In the meantime, why not treat the existing teams now as more of a culinary World Cup! Wherever you find great ethnic food, check in with that team.

Please let us know what kind of groups you’d like to see, we will make sure to create some to get everyone started.

With this release, you can now post your checkins to Facebook and Twitter.

If you are checking in with a team, you get a nice icon on a map:

And when you check out a place on the iPhone, you can see how many individual and team checkins a place has.

We also have a nice World Cup easter egg, who will be the first to find it? Let us know what you find in the comments!

Our leaderboard shows the top team checkins, on both a global basis, and for any specific area.

No surprise that team USA is leading the way, with England not far behind. With the highest density of Foursquare / Twitter users, makes sense we see most usage from these nationalities.

But with both these teams now out, can anyone make up the difference? The Germany Argentina showdown should be a good chance for these teams to make up ground, as they are currently 3 and 4 respectively.

To get the local view, we use the map viewport, and count checkins within a 10km radius. So just press the leaderboard and choose Nearby option to get the count.

Of course, if you want to just see the places where a specific team has checked in, use the Team filter, on the tab bar on the right side. Here are all the places in New York City where Team Germany has checked in. So if looking for a weissbier to help cool off, these might be good places to try!

If there is one surprise in any of this, it is the amazing spread of Foursquare and Mappr. Check out Jakarta! There seems to be an amazing number of Foursquare and Mappr users in Indonesia!

Have fun playing with the data! If you have any cool ideas on other things we can show, drop us a line!

We’ll let you now know about the name of our product. We are very excited to have the name Mappr, with the great URL http://map.pr. No URL shortening will be needed here!

Our new iPhone app is about ready to ship to the App Store, and we are in final testing now. If you are interested in helping test, or just want a sneak peak, let us know!

http://beta.map.pr/

We will have our new map.pr website up next week as well, will let you know all about it once it’s ready.

In the meantime, expect some more here on what it is we have built.

Sometimes, it takes a long time to do great things. And hiring is certainly one of those. One of the first things you learn at Google is how important it is to find the very best people. So we want to start now to make sure we can get the very best on board.

So what roles are we looking for? Well, I don’t write code, so that is more than enough business people for now! Ergo, we are looking for world class developers. The key skills are:

1. Attitude: Being in a startup takes unique sets of talents and mentality, a huge amount of dedication, and just a bit of craziness. We know, as we have been there before. It is no walk in the park, but hopefully we’ll cruise through the park at lightspeed on the way to somewhere else.

2. All-round awesomeness with code: We will be trying to solve some pretty tough challenges in the world of maps, local info, and search, and need to find 2 or 3 talented developers. We need to build web front ends, mobile apps, and cloud-based backends, at least for right now. Ideally, the people we find are able to excel in multiple areas.

Where? Ideally, based here in lovely (but currently slightly snowy) Stockholm.

We are far enough along to have lots to show and talk about. But not so far that the right people can’t make a real difference to our vision, and we certainly are still looking for full-fledged co-founders.

We are happy to talk quite openly about our plans, funding, and roles (and our super-secret, awesome URL) with any serious, qualified candidate. So if you want to know more, just drop me a line: bart at cartomapic dot com

And if this does not sound like you, but you send us someone we do hire, consider yourself first in line for a new iPad, on us!

I had played with the gmail-based bits for a while in Google, and still was not sure what to make of it. The best parts were coming across random status messages that proved to be useful. The worst parts was coming across random status messages that were not. Hard wheat/chaff problem to solve, methinks.

Finally, tweeted about it before, but there is the amazing resemblance of the new Google Buzz logo to the reco.se logo.

I will add more as the big reveal gets closer.

It all started with a great TV commercial for hitta.se, Schibsted’s local search property:

Funny content, with a message that obviously rings true for a lot of users. And Hitta went on a press offensive, quoting* statistics such as:

“only five per cent of those aged 15-50 years use the telephone directory, and that therefore it is time that the directory is now relegated to history.”

Eniro could not take that lying down, and had to defend their bread and butter. They put out a press release with their own facts and figures:

“44 percent of the Swedish population between 15-79 is the directory yellow pages at least once a month or more often.”

A quick search did not give me a full demographic age breakdown of Sweden, but I suppose that technically both studies could be true – with all people age 51-79 using the book once a month (using for what, is of course another question….).

But to perfect their press release, Eniro had to dig up and mangle the old Mark Twain quote:

“The reports of the phone book’s death are exaggerated!”

Mark Twain write this famous quip in 1897. He died in 1910.

So does the printed yellow page book have another 13 years, or are the reports of the book’s death not really that much of an exaggeration?

]]> http://cartomapic.com/2010/02/03/the-reports-may-indeed-be-a-exaggeration-but-yp-books-are-dying-soon-anyway/feed/ 2 http://cartomapic.com/2010/02/02/navteq-dont-forget-about-us-in-todays-quote-contest/ http://cartomapic.com/2010/02/02/navteq-dont-forget-about-us-in-todays-quote-contest/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:34:02 +0000 Bart Denny http://cartomapic.com/?p=158 Continuing in today’s theme of (less than brilliant) quotes from big company execs…

I was reading the latest installment of Mark Dobson’s excellent look into Google’s map data creation – if you are at all interested in the map data market and Google’s recent moves, read the whole series here. So far Dobson has put together the most comprehensive and insightful analysis of Google’s Map data moves I have seen.

In the comments on his latest post, he gets into a discussion with Mike Moore, who works in developer relations at Navteq. Mike takes a dim view of Google’s ability to innovate:

You seem to assume that innovation will be found in the search for advertising revenue. My personal experience is that the pursuit of advertising revenue simply is not enough of a driver to ensure a high quality product – although “good enough” is sometimes achieved.

Moore expands upon this theory this later in their e-mail exchange

In general terms, for any company with an advertising business, the customer is not the consumer or, in this dicussion, the application developer – the customer is the advertiser. Such a company is NOT a B2C company, it is a B2B company. Free-to-air radio for example, needs to keep listeners happy to generate ratings, but ratings are not the goal of the station – ratings are merely one selling tool to use with their customers.

The business plan for any such company is to do whatever it takes to keep the advertising revenue coming in. That business plan specifically does NOT allow for innovative “research and development” and “product improvement” in the underlying (I can’t think of a single radio station that also manages bands or owns a record label – although it may be possible there is one, somewhere)… instead, it is entirely focused on “reducing cost of delivery”.

So apparently, Google is not a B2C company, nor does it do much innovation, because their business model does not allow it.

Does Moore have any idea of the decisions Google made in creating AdWords? Does he know how much (short-term) ad revenue Google leaves on the table with things like Quality Score, which effectively removes irrelevant advertising? There are about 100 other examples I could provide to illustrate how silly this is. Having worked at Google, I can tell you without a doubt that the engineers and product managers working to create products are focused on only one thing: how to create the best user experience. Having worked closely with the geo team especially, I can say that their dedication to this was amazing, and they will not be happy with “good enough” products or content.

Google Maps are not perfect by a long shot, but the amount of innovation coming from the Google geo team far surpasses any other mapping provider. We shall see how this continues, but if that is the attitude coming from within Nokia/Navteq, I know where to place my bets…

Let’s kick it off with the CEO of the newly-emerged from bankruptcy US Yellow Page company Dex One (the big debt) artist formerly know as RH Donnelly. In his press release celebrating their rapid emergence from bankruptcy, he shares his tips for getting through bankruptcy quickly:

“We did a lot of pre-planning — we did not wait until we were in some kind of economic crisis,”

Pretty much shows the state of the industry if you plan for your bankruptcy well in advance.

However, that was not even closely the most WTF moment…

Even though eight in 10 Americans still use the yellow pages book, Dex One expects a decline in its print product over time, Swanson said.”There’s a shift to these other media — Internet, search engine, mobile or voice, but it is a slow evolutionary process. It’s not nearly as radical a change as I think many people would like to believe,”

Let’s ignore the first “fact” for now (do you know even eight *total* people who still use the Yellow Page book?). But this CEO thinks that the move to finding business information online is “slow evolutionary”? Nice though buddy, now get back to planning your next bankruptcy.

I will leave you with a quick poll. Which anagram do you find most amusing for the newly renamed Dex One?

• Ex Done
• Ex Node
• Ed Oxen
• Need Ox