iBegin Source has been around for over a month now, and we’ve had over 2500 non-commercial downloads (more on that later).

I thought I would take the time every few months to showcase a few sites using our data.

First up is Restaurant Reviews. We had a bit of hand in this product - the design was done by our design firm, Design Disease.

I absolutely love the design. I am definitely biased here, but I really think it has one of the nicest/cleanest UIs a local site has (I will admit - even nicer than iBegin’s).

The site is very fast to use, but I do wonder how they will get users involved. I talked to the two operators, Anita & Todd Cowan, and they promised me they have some interesting ideas. They did underscore that they want to remove anonymity and focus on the ‘meat’ - actual reviews, not stories and tales. Time will tell how it goes, but it does look good, and it does respond fast. I’ll do a follow up in a couple of months.

The other site is OddPath.

OddPath is an interesting one, a lot due to what happened in the background.

The site was developed by Kailash. Very smart and very talented (we acquired Commentful from him). When we had launched iBegin Source, I had showed him the site.

A few weeks later, we were chatting about performance optimization for searching through 10+ million records. After some discussion, he mentioned how he was working on a local site using iBegin Source.

One of the motivating factors behind iBegin Source was to enable hobbyists (ala Kailash) to build something local. While I firmly believe that our price point is extremely affordable, it can still be expensive for others (ala Kailash - a student). So while I had never officially announced it (I imagined it would be months before it would be useful) - we had always intended on awarding ‘free’ commercial licenses to interesting projects. They would still have to link back to iBegin Source, but otherwise they would get the full commercial data/license.

Case in point: OddPath. Kailash did the entire site himself, without incurring a dime in expenses (other than hosting). And he was able to do this because of iBegin Source.

Before I digress any further - OddPath’s best feature is its mobile search. Simple and effective, I think this is OddPath’s best feature. Other features such as ‘Buzz’ and ‘Pictures’ are interesting, but definitely need some fine tuning. The mobile feature (and its simplicity) could push him forward there.

So Greg posts about City Waboo, yet another local search site.

I did comment about how it seemed a bit rough around the edges.

The next comment was from BurbankGuy with the following:

Hey what do you know, my business is listed. I looked at the packages to upgrade, seem fair enough. it says they are against the pay per click model, thank god someone is, i have waisted more money on PPC in the last 6 months then anyone.

Seems like it is still in beta, so I would expect few things not working. I would like to see it when its out of beta.

BurbankGuy’s homepage is SendFlowersFast.com. So City Waboo has them already listed - impressive right? But wait - the WHOIS shows the following owner:

Administrative Contact:
Arakelyan, Eduard

And check out Waboo’s press release:

…” said Eduard Arakelyan, co-founder of CityWaboo.com.

Well well - looks like BurbankGuy actually owns Waboo.

This of course doesn’t negate the comment after BurbankGuy (by ‘BusinessExecutive’), which is so syrupy and full of praise it just screams ‘I have a vested interest in this site.’

Alexa, while crappy, makes for some fun analysis.

Frappr: it was bloody everywhere a year ago.

Today: ouch.

People forget that trends can take some time to rear their head. Then again, I’m still waiting for Yahoo! Answers to flame out - might have to wait a long time!

Since my last post on our all out assault on local, it seems like I’ve gone AWOL.

Alas, between a quick trip to Houston and focusing on such said assault, it is hard to get a break. Stuck staring at a computer screen for upto 16 hours a day, spending even more time makes me dizzy.

I had missed over something when I had talked about local - weather. Our most requested feature on weather. So after my latest blog post, we got another two requests in one day for weather.

It was time to do something about it.

So (while running everything else), we heavily pressed on weather. Turns out the US Government provides weather information, as does the Canadian Government (but not nearly as openly). Problem is that relying on the government for an XML service is dangerous - their servers are notorious for flaking out at any given time. So we pressed for enterprise solutions to weather delivery.

In under 10 days, we have a fully functioning weather site: iBegin Weather. It is 99% done - the caching element is still a work in progress (right now we fetch data ‘live’ - the updated version will automatically do that every 20 minutes). The site design is ripped straight from iBegin Source - keeping with our simple/clean/quick loading motif. We even have a nice widget for spreading weather. Example: Share San Francisco, CA Weather.

Again - underlines the versatility a larger company can have. Our illustrator did the icons and other misc graphics (roughly 100). Our JS/PHP guy did the widget. Another programmer focused on the primary engine. Data-provider gave us easy to use CSV files that make data manipulation easy. Our geocoding abilities let us figure out spatial distances that would have cost a pretty penny. And previous experience with sites like iBegin let us churn out an intelligent structure, XML feeds, and even try to guess where the user is from.

We should have the site 100% by Tuesday morning (and thus our ‘launch’). We should be in the rest of the world (~15,000 locations outside of the US) in 4-6 weeks.