A while ago the Flicker.com for sale story made the rounds. It was a simple site - stating what had been offered, and their status (all rejected). If you read the comments, I mention Sahar owns the domain - and he commented denying any ownership.

It now redirects to a site called Assista. A kind of meld between a search engine and Yahoo Answers. A site owned by Sahar. I wonder how Yahoo feels about this?

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 a while ago, I bought a Vudu. It is like an Apple TV - connect it to the internet, hook it up to your TV, and buy/rent movies through the system.

Yesterday, while attempting to watch I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, the thing died. Or it didn’t die per se - it would play the movie for about 30 seconds, before dying and rebooting. A tad bit annoying.

So I posted on the forum, and helpful people swooped in. I called the customer support number, and even though it was 9:30 am PST, the automated system said that customer service opened up at 9:00 am.

Uhoh … this could be bad.

I called back half an hour later, and had customer support on the phone in about 30 seconds. The conversation went like so:

Ahmed: My Vudu isn’t working, *story goes here*
Operator: Sir can I have your name
Ahmed: Ahmed Farooq
Operator: Okay, found it. There must be a glitch with your hardware. You will be sent a new Vudu, and a fedex shipping slip to send back your current Vudu
Ahmed: That was easy
Operator: Have a good day.

The entire conversation lasted maybe 90 seconds. From dial to hang up was < 3 minutes. Color me happy!

In terms of the actual product, some quick thoughts:

• It is damn easy to use. The remote is absolutely wonderful.
• It really needs to remember preferences. Eg I only use it to rent movies. Why it can’t do that boggles my mind
• I can’t see my viewing history through the Vudu. Boo!
• I hate the 24 hour rental period. 48 hours would be more than enough. Too many times something comes up while I’m watching a movie and I have to pause.
• I know this is a licensing issue/headache, but the delay in getting some movies to rental (and the price for some older movies) is annoying. Really annoying.
• I like the HD offerings. I watched 3:10 to Yuma HD and it was absolutely crisp on my 42″
• Some of the categorization is mind boggling. Eg I believe The Hills have Eyes (or similar) was categorized as ‘romantic’. Speaking of categorization, need more (eg animated!)

Overall I’m very happy. Extremely convenient, fast, and easy to use. Right now it’s like a 90% - if they could get release dates fixed and the prices for older movies more balanced, it would be high up in the upper 90s.

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.

I always found Brand Power ads to be super-cheesy, but always intriguing. I pride myself on ‘turning off’ of ads, but I actually respond to those ads.

Turns out I’m not the only one.

Just like sites like Craigslist and 37signals do well due to their emphasis on simplicity (while others go ga-ga over complexity), looks like the simplicity concept works well in TV advertising too.

Has anyone noticed that more than half of the ads seem to ‘hide’ the product until the last 2 seconds? What is up with that?

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.

Covered here by the Financial Post. Incidentally no mention of TrueLocal at all.

What would be nice is a conference organizer/searcher. Yes there are sites like AllConferences.com but the data isn’t “rich”. I want to be able to say - hrmm … I want to do business with Company X - what conferences are they attending? Or even better, Person Y - what conferences are speaking at?

Anything like that out there?

So I had talked about the Dallas Cowboys and their mishap with cowboys.com. Now our good friendly domain of Cowboys.com features ads for gay porn.

I am sure the fact that the landing page uses the exact same colors as the Dallas Cowboys is just a delicious coincidence.