Would somebody please build “menupages for winelists”, on a mobile device. I’d like to be able to walk into a restaurant I’ve never been to, with a wine list as long as my arm, and have the app be able to recommend wines off the wine list. Cross-reference Wine Spectator scores and prices, so I can ask: “what’s the highest rated Merlot”? “Which Italian Red has the best value (price per wine spectator point)”?. Or even just see what the street price of the wine is, and it’s rating. Anything to help me make sense out of that monster list of choices. I have some wine apps I love – my friend Brad Rosen’s Drync for example – but none that I know of has access to the wine list in a venue, the way menupages has access to, and provides searching on, the menus in a restaurant.
Category Archives: Search
Some quick thoughts on Google’s acquisition of ITA
Wow. Things are really getting interesting. I’ve been talking for a while now about the convergence of search & travel, search & local, search & mobile/location based services. This is just another proof point (a $700M proof point). It doesn’t really affect Goby directly – we really haven’t been playing in the airfare space, we decided a long time ago to leave that to people who already do it well. The biggest potential losers in this deal are the metasearch players and online travel agencies – Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, because Google can now build a user experience for flight search that dis-intermediates those companies and connects users directly to airlines for purchasing.
There’s also an interesting tension with many travel advertisers – Google receives billions of dollars in travel advertising revenue, but increasingly travel companies are viewing Google as competition (through things like Google Places pages and Google City Tours), and might take their ad $ elsewhere. The other interesting potential loser is Microsoft, for two reasons. First, Bing Travel is a great differentiator for Bing, and now Google has said they will build a competitor, where previously they had none. Second, Bing Travel (an enhanced and re-branded version of Farecast), was powered by ITA – it will be interesting to see how long that lasts!
Interesting times indeed. As airfares become more and more of a pure commodity, at Goby we’re thinking the action in the industry will turn to finding experiences – the real reason people travel. And Goby is perfectly positioned for that.
(btw – in addition to the obvious, Google is a winner in that they get a huge pool of deep engineering talent, and vertical expertise in the travel industry. They also pick up an interesting and not well publicized asset of ITA, the Needle project).
Microsoft takes a shot at what Apple should be doing.
Microsoft is apparently listening to my blog – they’ve gone and launched the search engine I said Apple should build a few months ago – a media and entertainment search engine! (Or is this their version of me saying “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea?” 8).
Bing Entertainment (http://www.bing.com/entertainment) covers Music, Movies, TV, Games, and Video Games. It has a very attractive, browsable interface with a lot of rich media – for example, the music page shows photos, links to audio clips of the artist, as well as upcoming live performances. In spirit, I love what they are trying to do. They’ve even stolen a page from the wonderful (but defunct) service Lala which Apple acquired. You can play over 5 million songs in their entirety once for free. So if you ever wondered if you’d like Miles Davis’ Flamenco Sketches, now you can find out, for free, without engaging in any piracy: http://www.bing.com/music/songs/search?q=miles+davis&go=&form=DTPMUS.
Or at least, in principle you can. If you click on the play links, you get a “coming soon” message. Seriously, Microsoft? What was the hurry to launch, that you called this out in your press release (http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2010/06/23/a-new-entertainment-experience-for-bing.aspx) as one of the main features, and it doesn’t work? In practice, I find the implementation of Bing Entertainment to be disappointing (in contrast, Bing Travel is done very well). So far as I can tell there is no integration whatsoever between the search bar and the browse panels that are right next to each other. For example, a search for “Lady Gaga” produces the same search results as if I’d gone to Bing proper. It’s positioned as a media search product, but in reality it appears to be an entertainment portal with hard-coded content (and not very deep content), with a disconnected search box right next to it. The catalog appears to be very shallow. A search for the “Archer” TV show was disappointing – effectively the same search as on Bing “proper”. (BTW Archer is an absolutely hysterical parody of James Bond meets Beavis & Butthead meets “The office” – check it out if you haven’t seen it). In the entertainment space, there is a very limited catalog of entities that need to be recognized – how many TV shows are there, after all? Those should be recognized as special searches and treated accordingly. My search for “Archer” should have taken me to an Archer landing page. While it is positioned as a media search product, the search angle is virtually non-existent. The positioning of the product is spot-on, but the execution is lacking. Apple has a huge opportunity here – if Apple makes this product, the user experience is going to sing (perhaps even literally!).
Goby gets covered by Scoble!
Had a great (and very informative!) visit with Robert Scoble, his coverage is here. He said some great things about us (“more important than foursquare”!), but one of the most rewarding things was that his wife loves Goby as well. It’s one thing to impress someone technical with what you’ve achieved – it’s even more rewarding when people who aren’t in it for the technology see the usefulness of something in their daily life.
Here’s the interview:
Apple, Search, Task & Context
I’ve posted on a number of occasions about task-centric search and how it’s the future of information access. I’ve also speculated on what kind of search engine Apple should (and might be) building. Some recent comments from Steve Jobs have strengthened one of my theories and thrown cold water on the other.
First, the cold water. According to Jobs, Apple isn’t building a search engine. Some other folks suggest he’s not being entirely forthcoming, but I suspect he’s telling the truth in a literal sense. In the figurative sense though, Apple has a different vision for how people consume information – it may not be “search”, but it is information finding:
On the desktop search is where it’s at; that’s where the money is. But on a mobile device search hasn’t happened. Search is not where it’s at, people are not searching on a mobile device like they do on the desktop. (more here)
Put one way, “there’s an app for that”(TM). In terms I’ve used before, context is the organizing principle for information access, and what is a mobile app if not “context” embodied? Context can be summarized with a mnemonic: TILT. Task, Identity, Location and Time. If I know your TILT, I know your context. An iPhone app has a pretty good implicit idea about all of those things. Who you are, what you’re doing, and where & when you are. That’s why mobile apps like Yelp or Goby can so effectively answer information needs with just a few taps. John Batelle has expressed some similar ideas here. This is why people use apps on the iPhone rather than search, as Jobs suggests. That’s why Goby manifests very differently on the iPhone than in does on the web, even though the underlying information model is the same.
The broader point: in the future, information finding will be supported by task-centric, contextual search applications, not general purpose “search box + 10 blue links” search engines. They’ll manifest differently on the web than in mobile environments, but share the underlying premise.