DDL:08 was a good experience for us - it was the first time we ever had a booth (though we have sponsored other events), and it was a good experience (more on that later).

Right now though I want to point out to a bonafide ass.

Part of our sponsorship was us sponsoring a Cyber Cafe. At the conference they have two sets of three computers connected to the internet. Two companies sponsor the cyber cafe, setting the homepage on the computer to a site specified by the sponsor. As such, three of the computers were set to www.ibegin.com and the other three were set to www.homes.com.

We noticed this earlier on, and it happened non-stop - some ass kept going over to the six computers and kept setting www.bizclip.com/portfolio/ as his homepage. And by non-stop I mean he would come by every 30 minutes to do this.

I never actually saw the bugger doing this as I was too busy to wait to catch him, but quite a few people let me know what was going on, including one of our employees.

I can only imagine the kind of service and product you would receive from someone who would stoop to such a level. Consider yourself warned.

Update: I should note that quite a few people did this. This one particular individual did it multiple times. At the same time - other than human decency I cannot imagine a way to ’solve’ this kind of behavior. Timers, perma-frames, etc - they all have drawbacks. So really nothing Kelsey nor we can do about it.

Post on why not submitting to iBegin.com is a bad idea!

So with iBegin Share v2 coming out soon (stat tracking), we thought we would go ahead and support the Open Share Icon project. But one thing is off - the official website.

The Feed Icon has the pretty feedicons.com site, OPML has an equally purty opmlicons.com, and even the Geotag Icon has a functional geotagicons.com site. And I am quite sure that Sharing is a far more common activity than using OPML or geotags.

If you guys want, we can gladly make a website for it

So I’m at the tail end of LeadsCon, getting ready to go home.

To me, the best two sessions were ‘Keynote Address: Lessons From the Leaders’ and ‘Uncovering Local Lead Generation’

The first was an interesting story - how things were done, how much FreeCreditReport.com cost (hand regged!), and so forth. Personal stories of success and development are always good.

The second was interesting in the sense of mechanics - the background work required to make local lead generation work. What is expect from businesses, and what is expected from consumers, and match the two.

The rest in the middle, while executed well (I much prefer talk sessions than podium preaching), was boiled down to two core issues:

1. Teeth gnashing at what meanies the FTC are and how they hate us
2. Teeth gnashing at the mortgage industry explosion, and looking forward to the housing market coming back

It was, in my opinion, far too retrospective, when it should have been more forward-thinking. What I got (and remember, this is my perspective), was that the only new thing was lead scoring.

My intent in coming was of course locally-oriented - local lead gen, while a tougher nut to crack than the traditional ‘financial’ categories (mortgage, debt, loans, financing), is also potentially far more lucrative (higher margins, repeat customers, word of mouth effectiveness). Yet every single established company I talked to had the same boiler plate answer - we think it’s great, it’s on our list of things to do, but not in the year 2008.

It reminded me a lot of the domainer industry. All those PPC companies are basically the same (their ads come via Google or Yahoo), and they all sell the same services. Instead of trying to evolve the market in new ways, it seems like everyone is content sitting on their laurels fighting each other for the same leads, instead of trying to work on new areas where there is no competition.

Yes there were most definitely some individuals who want to try new things, who are looking at new types of leads. But the local space requires scale and operations - a one man operation won’t make much of a dent in local lead gen.

At the end of the day, this just elucidates the level of disconnect happening between some of the major industries I travel. Local companies should be interested in domains (readymade traffic - just look at Marchex), and should be interested in getting the most money out of a consumer (lead gen!). Yet I saw almost zero local-oriented companies. Domainers should love local (’unlocking’ the potential of their domains) and lead gen (leaving the Google/Yahoo duopoly) … but again, few domainers. Lead gen should love domainers (source of traffic) and local (higher margins, new areas) - but again, little interaction.

I almost feel like a trailblazer trying to connect the three - anyone else actively participating in these three areas?

#1 - it is now called iBegin Labs. Unfortunately too many people mis-understood the play on ‘beta’ and going for ‘gamma.’ Lesson learned - don’t be too clever for your own good, go with the simple.

We have the updates here, but the most interesting is the launch of iBegin Places.

I think it will be interesting to see how this pans out. Ideally geo-aware people will add their neighborhoods, and use polygons mapped out by others. The actual creation process is quite simple. But will people do it? I have no clue. But it should be interesting to see in what directions it goes. And to show the system in action, you can see the Zillow neighborhood data mapped out (get the original neighborhood data here).

Mike Boland got to chat with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman and posted his thoughts.

Some very interesting information, and excellent points about the qualitative factors of a review (which seems to be missing in most UGC conversations).

But I did laugh at this:

Stoppleman is excited about the directions the mobile world is moving …

Is there anyone in local not excited about where the mobile space is going?

So we’ve finally launched what I had touched on before - iBegin Gamma. Consider it our version of Google Labs. Let us know what you think.

We would have failed. Miserably.

As I emailed our in-house designer (the amazingly talented Elena of Design Disease) the fifth design for iBegin Source (since incarnation), it hit how much we had evolved since our launch. I had the original idea for iBegin in October 2005 (while showering of course). The entire idea behind iBegin Source hit me in October 2006. And the plans for harnessing that data for something bigger hit me in October 2007 (odd recurring theme eh!)

I was talking to my lead programmer, and he was very angry at the old startup he had worked at. They had burned through something like $6 million, and had recently launched something he had worked on. Except they had botched it. Badly. And he was railing how if they had spent the proper time it would have come out right.

I just shook my head and smiled.

When we had originally launched iBegin, I think about a dozen VCs came to us in the first 3 months or so. They all liked the idea of local social search, and wanted to expand on it. Quickly. Yelp was gaining steam, and with Judy’s Book and InsiderPages all growing too, they were convinced that untold amounts of money was to be made.

Thankfully, I had a philosophy, and I stuck with it.

And it became clear relatively quickly that the sales channel and the review channel did not mesh very well. A vice-versa catch-22 - if a business had good reviews, why bother advertising? If a business had bad reviews, why bother advertising?

By not funding and deciding to take my time, I was able to re-assess without having fire being breathed down my neck. Heck I even went on a one week vacation to clear my head.

And so iBegin Source came out. But we knew it wouldn’t make a big profit for a long time. We knew that it would take time to lay the groundwork to establish with potential customers. With potential partners. Not months, but years. And we had the luxury of not needing to meet annual forecasts as dictated by someone else. No need to bring immediate profit.

And boy am I thankful. Yes we have had our share of headaches. And yes sometimes its been nice to think “this would be so much easier with a couple million behind us.” But the reality is at the end of the day, the millions would not have made a difference. We would have been well on our way towards oblivion like the other review-based sites.

And we have much more up our sleeves. Our little ‘innovation’ house should be launching in the next 48 hours - nothing ground breaking, but interesting enough to maybe spark a few brain cells. And our long term plan is executing beautifully - even slightly faster than I had anticipated.

I love it when people cover companies that organically grew into something very notable. I hope to join those ranks in the next three years.

While I am usually ready to yap away on any topic, I tend to shy away from the “Are the Yellow Pages Relevant / Irrelevant?” Greg’s latest post on the topic brought out some heat in the comments.

Then I came across the wonderful argument for the Yellow Pages:

o your surprise you have a flooded basement. Are you going to stop and take the time to turn on your computer, wait for it to load, wait for the internet connection to actually work with you, connect and then search? No most people are going to pick up their Verizon Yellow pages flip to the type of business they need and call. That is what it is all about.

Of course there is another one down the page, and I’ve seen this argument a few other times.

Other than the inherent fear-mongering (oh noes it takes 20 minutes to load up your web browser, at which point your house will have fallen down), the entire argument is rather extreme and simplistic. What she has outlined is a worst case situation. I don’t ever remember my house being flooded. The other comment below argues what happens if the electricity goes out. The last time I remember the electricity going out was the massive East Coast Grid failure back in 2003 (at which point calling an electrician would have been useless).

As someone who has moderated a ton of reviews by business owners, the comments themselves reek of someone from inside the YP area making that comment. What boggles my mind is … is that the best there is? That one should keep the YP around for extremely rare cases? I should have some giant book take up space because maybe, just maybe, I might lose the electricity? Or because it is so complicated to turn on your computer and ‘connect’ to the internets? That is the argument? Are you kidding me? And I haven’t even mentioned the iPhone yet - in both cases I have local search bookmarked, it would take me roughly 15 seconds to navigate to a page to do a search, flood or no flood, electricity or no electricity.

Everything has strengths and weaknesses. All this bluster does no one any good.

We do a lot of stuff in the local space that never sees the light of day. Be it internal analysis, coding projects, little snippets, ‘widgets’, and so forth. A set of non-core and (even) non-useful stuff that still should be published online.

So hopefully in the next week or two we can launch a little version of our own ‘labs’ here at iBegin. Shouldn’t be taken too seriously - just some random testing, thoughts, and projects of our own (most half completed) for the world to enjoy.

Update: and it be here.