An app that really is "free as in beer"

Free software can be "free as in beer" (i.e. no cost) or "free as in speech" (i.e. open source), or both. The Nelso Prague app takes this literally - it provides actual free beer.

The latest update to the Prague app (download link), contains three Passbook coupons for restaurants in Prague, one of which (Hergetova Cihelna) was the site of the second PragueCrunch meetup. These coupons entitle the bearer to a free beer, no purchase required, or a glass of prosecco.

We're doing this as a test of the appeal of Passbook to travelers - so if you're in Prague, download the app and have a free beer on us.

Nelso Prague App Now a Top 10 Travel App in Russia

A few weeks ago, we finally started charging for our Nelso Прага app ("Прага" is "Prague" in Russian). Earlier today, it moved into the top 10 for travel apps in Russia (#7).

Improved coverage of Sweden

Our roaming team of iPhone-wielding data collectors drove down the west coast of Sweden over the past few days, dramatically improving our coverage of Göteborg and Helsingborg. Helsingborg in particular is important to Nelso as it's right across the water from Helsingør, Denmark and is a popular destination for users of Nelso.dk, our most popular site.

The "Starbucks" of Norway

While translating some text from Norwegian to English, I was surprised to find the word "Starbucks" in the English translated text, because Norway doesn't have any Starbucks locations. What was triggering the Starbucks connection was a reference to the Kaffebrenneriet chain of cafes in Norway, which are ubiquitious in the Oslo metro area. However, despite the obvious similarities to the US-based Starbucks, Kaffebrenneriet is not Starbucks and it's confusing for Google to translate it as such. It would be equally confusing to translate every reference to "Milka" in a German-language text as "Hershey's" in English.

Covering a city in less than a week

Using our proprietary iPhone app to collect data, a team of four has completed data collection for the center of Oslo, Norway in less than a week. Each user added on average 250 places a day. We now have more verified listings (business data checked by our staff in the street) in Oslo than we have in Copenhagen, our current #1 market.

Is the GoogleBot finally paying attention to microformats?

While checking our ranking on various Google local sites, specifically "supermarkets in Copenhagen" ( Supermarkeder i København), we came across this page in the results (see screenshot if the page has changed since I posted this). Below the main link to the Nelso.dk site, it says "10+ records" and then goes on to list some of the records in a way that leads me to believe that they are finally showing end users the results of parsing hCard microformats. I'm sure the GoogleBot has been collecting microformat data for a long time, but this is the first time I've ever seen our listings actually improved by the fact that we are providing this data.

Politically Correct Local Search

In the process of double checking the phone number for the Restaurant Peking, a Chinese restaurant in Prague, I got a strange search result from Google (see screenshot). Google has a listing for the restaurant, but they've renamed it the Restaurant Beijing.

What's next? A listing on Google Music for the Smashing Pumpkins' Conjoined Twins Dream?

Tábor

Our smallest city yet for serious data collection: Tábor, Czech Republic. With only 35,000 inhabitants, shouldn't take long to cover.

Cheese Bread

Brewsta of Czech Please posted photos of a new Georgian place in Prague called Chačapuri, which means "cheese bread" in English. I'd never heard of this dish, usually transliterated as Khachapuri, but it looks delicious.

Actually had to add a new category to the database to accommodate this place. We've got over 4,000 categories already, but never had a need for "Georgian Restaurant" until now.

Ústí nad Labem

We've started serious data collection in our first city of less than 100,000 inhabitants — Ústí nad Labem. In a way, this is an experiment. We expect less competition from other local search sites in a smaller city, but the value of a listing might also be smaller. In the Czech Republic specifically, there is also the possibility that lower incomes in smaller cities will affect internet use. We'll see.

No Apple Maps in iOS 5

A few months ago, I wrote about the possibility of Apple dropping Google and building their own maps and mapping application for iOS.

According to recent reports, it appears these new maps will not be ready in time for iOS5. However, I do expect Apple to ditch Google maps at some point, possibly even in a point release of iOS5.

Los Angeles

We've started preliminary data collection in Los Angeles, California. We already rank well in languages like Czech, but it'll be a lot more work to rank in German, English, or Spanish.

Udělejte fotku se svým chytrým telefonem a my Vám pošleme 200 Kč

Nelso již disponuje nejrozsáhlejším adresářem restaurací, barů a kaváren v Praze, ale nebudeme spokojeni, dokud podniky nebudou všechny.

Za tímto účelem nabízíme odměnu 200 Kč každému, kdo nám pošle fotografii baru, restaurace nebo kavárny, která ještě není uvedená na stránkách www.nelso.cz.

Ano, je to až tak snadné - jednoduše najděte místo, které neexistuje na naší stránce, pošlete nám jeho fotografii a my Vám převedeme 200 Kč přes PayPal.

1. Hledáme pouze místa, která nejsou v našem adresáři. Pro jistotu zkotrolujte, zda podnik v databázi ještě není na www.nelso.cz.
2. Své fotky pošlete na fotky@nelso.cz.
3. Před odesláním doplňte do předmětu emailu jméno podniku. Do těla zprávy zapište adresu a orientační číslo, pokud je k dispozici, a informaci o druhu podniku, např. řecká, kotejl bar, atd.
4. Všechny fotky musí obsahovat souřadnice GPS jako meta data. Ujistěte se, že jste umožnili geotagy fotografií ve vašem mobilním telefonu.
5. Pošlete co nejvyšší možné rozlišení, neposílejte zmenšené obrázky.
6. Musí se jednat o fotografii baru, restaurace nebo kavárny, takže McDonald’s je OK ale supermarket Billa ne.
7. V této fázi chceme pouze fotky míst v Praze. Soutěž pro uživatele z jiných měst otevřeme později. “Praha” je definována na této mapě.
   
   
   View Nelso Fotky - Praha in a larger map


8. Fotografie musí být zaostřená a jméno podniku musí být viditelné. Můžete poslat několik obrázků stejného místa, pokud to bude potřeba.
9. Obrázky posílejte z emailu, který je spojen s Vaším PayPal účtem.
10. Pokud Vaše fotografie a email budou splňovat výše uvedené požadavky, pošleme Vám 200 Kč za každou fotku poslanou na fotky@nelso.cz.
11. Není stanoven limit na počet fotek od jednotlivých uživatelů, ale tato promo akce je omezená celkovým rozpočtem 250 000 Kč. Aktuálně vyplacenou sumu budeme průběžně publikovat na Facebooku.
12. Vyhrazujeme si právo odmítnout fotografie bez uvedení důvodu. Odmítnuté fotky se NEOBJEVÍ na stránkách Nelso.cz

When I hear "Paris", I think of France, not Texas

While looking through the Google Analytics for Nelso.dk, I was pleased to find that we rank very well for the search term "Museer i Paris, Frankrig" ("Museums in Paris, France" in Danish). Despite ranking well for that term, we aren't getting a lot of traffic for Paris museum searches, which I found odd. I would've thought that this would be a common search for tourists visiting the City of Light.

The solution to the problem is that Nelso.dk doesn't rank nearly as well for the search "Museer i Paris" ("Museums in Paris"). Situations like this show the weakness of search engines like Google when searching for a topic or concept rather than specific words.

Imagine a library where one client asks for some books about "museums in Paris, France" and gets a different set of recommendations from a client coming to the info desk minutes later asking for "museums in Paris". A human librarian would view these queries as equivalent and wouldn't be fooled by the slightly different wording. I mean, if you really wanted books on Paris, Texas you'd say so.

But for Google, "Paris" and "Paris, France" are different queries producing different results. Even in a field as mature as full-text search, there's a lot of work to be done.

Demand Media traffic down 40 precent

According to an article at Forbes.com, traffic to the Demand Media sites is down 40% since the Google "Panda" update aimed at reducing the prominence of content farms in search results.

This just further confirms my belief that the way Nelso collects business data, by actually going out into the street to verify every listing, will pay off in the long run.

Why didn't Volvo want Android users?

The baseball season has started, and tempted by an offer of free access to live games for the month of April, I downloaded the MLB.com At Bat app for the iPad.

The free live baseball broadcasts are sponsored by Volvo. However, the promotion is only available to iOS users, even though the MLB At Bat app is available for Android. Curious.

One can assume that this promotion was quite expensive (a one month subscription to mlb.tv costs $19.99), and as such Volvo had to choose its demographic target carefully.

But why not Android users? People who buy smartphones are, in theory, ideal candidates for car advertising. According to an April 2011 report from Greystripe on the car buying habits of smartphone users:

The auto industry is also using touch smartphones and tablets as a medium to reach new potential customers, given the attractiveness of the user base. Specifically, U.S. iPhone and Android users are three times more likely to buy a new car than the U.S. adult population.

But it's really no surprise that Volvo wouldn't want to advertise to Android users. The Android demographic probably isn't a good fit for a Scandinavian luxury car maker. Most of the criticisms of iOS and Apple could also be applied to Volvo: the product is too expensive compared to other products with similar capabilities, the marketing stresses hard-to-define qualities like "design", "safety", and "user experience", and "I don't see myself as one of those people" (the bourgeoisie).

So who should Major League Baseball get to sponsor the Android version of the app? I can think of a few possibilities.

Hyundai: The most common complaint about Apple products is that they are expensive. The Hyundai Accent is the cheapest car sold in the US, and so is immune to such charges.

Chevrolet: Even if one does want to spend a lot on a computer, many wouldn't buy Apple because they can get the same processing power for less. The Chevy Camaro, producing 312 HP in its base configuration and costing only $22,680, has more power per dollar than any other car.

Other possibilities would be kit cars (for those who build their own computers) or the Jeep Wrangler (lots of customization possibilites).

In my case, the promotion worked well. I have two small children, and after watching hundreds of Volvo ads in the MLB At Bat app, I'm seriously considering a Volvo for my next car purchase.

What to call this? A "decagooglewhack"?

A Googlewhack is a search term that returns only a single result, which is unusual because the size of the web makes it unlikely that a phrase has only been used once on the billions of web pages in existence.

A friend of Nelso recently directed me to another Google anomaly. In this case, it's not that a search term returns only one result, but that he found a search term - "mujsalekkavy" - that returns Nelso sites for all ten results on the first page (see screenshot).

The business in question, Můjšálekkávy, has a Flash site, which makes this a lot easier to pull off, because Flash sites tend to index poorly.

Microsoft launches "Bing Places"

Well, it's not called "Bing Places" (that's a Google term), it's called "Bing Business Portal". But the idea is exactly the same - this is Bing/Microsoft's response to Google Places.

The only surprise in this announcement is that it took Bing/Microsoft this long to launch a proper competitor to Google's local search product.

Factory Outlets in Italy

We've had a quite a bit of success with our listings for factory outlets, and today we covered another big outlet complex in northern Italy. Click through to check out the listings for factory outlets in Barberino di Mugello, Italia.

No more Google Street View in Germany

A number of news sites are reporting today that Google will not be continuing Street View photography in Germany. While the 20 cities already covered will remain on-line, there will be no new cities covered, and the existing cities won't be getting any updates.

Google had attempted to address the privacy concerns of Germans by allowing homes and businesses to opt out of Street View, but in the end it seems they decided it just wasn't worth the trouble.

It's unclear the impact this will have on Nelso's data collection efforts in Germany. We'll certainly have to be quite careful not to reveal license plate numbers and faces in the photos we take of businesses. We'll also need to allow businesses to opt out of having their photos displayed on the Nelso sites.