We're very close to launching a new site for travelers from Brazil (we don't have any local search listings for Brazil) at Nelso.com.br.
This is an exciting opportunity for Nelso — Brazil has more internet users (about 72m) than Germany, and far more than the combined populations of Denmark and the Czech Republic (where we operate our most popular sites, Nelso.dk and Nelso.cz).
There's been substantial progress made on Nelso.lv, and very soon we will be able to start properly promoting the site to Latvian speakers. Take a look at a list of the translated categories for Prague, Barcelona, and Stockholm. Even in this state I think it's a useful resource for the Latvian traveler.
UPDATE 8/12/2010: The core translation is now almost complete.
We've been working on processing all the photos we took in Amsterdam in early October, and there are now more than 1,300 fully verified business listings on Nelso (and thousands more to come over the next few weeks). Of course, these are available in all the languages we support (for example, here's a list of Amsterdam restaurants in German).
As we now have most of the center well covered, we'll be issuing an iPhone app for Amsterdam soon.
We've launched a new site for Latvia (more by accident than by design) at Nelso.lv. The translation is only about 3% complete at this point, but we do have a list of Prague cafes in Latvian.
We've got 50,000 photos of Amsterdam businesses in our queue. They'll take at least a few weeks to process, but when done should give us some of the best local search coverage of Amsterdam available on the web.
It does have the ability (as the older iPods Touch did) to get a location using a WiFi signal. It also has a new feature (first launched in the iPhone 4) in that it contains a gyroscope. Along with the accelerometer, and WiFi as a way to input an initial position, we should now have all the tools required to build an (albeit crude) inertial navigation system for the iPod Touch 4 (some might call this "dead reckoning") . Has such a thing been built yet? I wish I had more free time - I wouldn't mind taking a crack at it myself.
Both my sons have an iPod Touch, and there's no better torture test for a consumer electronics device than to give one to a three-year-old and let him play with it. I think one of the reasons that small children are so destructive is that they don't understand the concept of money, and therefore don't fear breaking an expensive hand-held computer like an iPod Touch.
But my oldest son recently subjected his second-generation 8GB iPod Touch to the ultimate torture test - he tried to continue playing Angry Birds while diving to the bottom of a pool. When he came back up, and I realized he still had it in his hand, I took it away, dried it off with a towel, and watched the display distort (the way they portray a long-distance video call in movies) before it died. I set it on the shelf to let it dry out, thinking it was dead forever.
But after a week, I plugged in the power, turned it on, and it worked. Well, the WiFi no longer works, but other than that it seemed to be no worse for wear after its underwater expedition.
However, I found that the only apps that I could open were the apps supplied by Apple with iOS. No third-party apps would launch (they quit after the splash screen) - not even apps that don't use the WiFi connection. I don't see the WiFi as being the problem, because as you can see from the video below, even Apple-supplied apps that require WiFi (e.g. YouTube) launch without problems on this submarine iPod.
I demand that Apple make this API public. We could then release an app that would cover not only the land portion of Australia, but could also be used by scuba divers while diving in the Great Barrier Reef (and the off-line function of our apps would be a big bonus here - GPS doesn't work underwater, and getting a cell signal underwater requires some serious equipment).
And speaking of iPods and iOS, Nelso has an ever-growing catalog of off-line travel apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can download our most recent app, an iPhone guide to Barcelona, for free from the App Store.
Based on our stats from Flurry for our Prague iPhone app, over 80% of the users of the app in the Czech Republic are on the O2 (formerly Eurotel) network. It's a well-known fact that O2 has the lion's share of business and high-income customers in the Czech Republic, but I was surprised by these numbers.
Here's the breakdown for our Prague app:
Carrier
Percentage of requests
O2 (Eurotel)
82.7%
T-Mobile
13.2%
Vodafone
4.1%
Of course, these numbers only represent what we are able to measure. That said, the Nelso Prague app is installed on over 5,000 Czech iPhones, so this is a pretty good sample.
While this raw data is by itself very useful for iPhone developers (e.g. we really should support French in the Nelso iPhone apps), I thought it might be interesting to see how these numbers compare to the populations of the various countries in which the iPhone is sold.
Thus, I've taken AdMob's numbers and divided them by the population of the country (using figures from Wikipedia) to arive at a rough estimation of iPhone OS penetration. Keep in mind that the real numbers will be higher than this - AdMob can only measure requests to its ad network. For comparison, AdMob claims approx. 10m iPhones in the U.S., while AT&T reports more than 15m iPhone subscribers on its network.
I haven't included every country in the report, just the top 20 and a few other countries that interest Nelso (e.g. Czech Republic, Poland, etc.). For the full list, grab a copy of the spreadsheet from AdMob's site (you'll have to insert the population numbers yourself, of course).
Singapore looks like the big winner here, with over nine percent of the population using an iOS device. Assuming these device numbers are low, and that 25% of the population is either under 15 or over 65, iPhone use among young(ish) men in Singapore must be impressive indeed.
Although Google certainly has an impressive algorithm for ranking pages in its index, I think the real strength of Google's search is the speed and depth of its indexing.
We've recently photographed the entire Malmö, Sweden city center, and we're now in the process of getting these new places into the Nelso database. An entry made one hour ago, Restaurang Bollywood, has already been indexed by Google, and already ranks fairly well (#5).
This is astounding. One could hardly call Nelso a major site, and the fact that Google still monitors our site constantly for new content shows how serious they are about having the best search on the internet. Yahoo! and Bing would likely be more significant sources of traffic for Nelso if they would index us as well as Google.
We're very close to launching a new site for travelers from Brazil (we don't have any local search listings for Brazil) at Nelso.com.br.
