What a bit of competition can accomplish. Definitely an outsider in the Search Engine Battle, A9.com (owned by Amazon.com) continues to do innovative things. They’ve recently launched this crazy new feature called block view. It’s a basic local search, based on the yellow page listings, including search results on a map, but they’ve combined it with photos of the storefront of businesses. And then it let’s you ‘walk’ down the block.
I’m wondering if this is brilliant or one of those, “let’s do it because we can”. Either way, the way they do it is very slick. And how on earth are they planning to keep the pictures up to date? Businesses come and go. We’ll find out.
A better application in my mind would be do drive down all freeways and take pictures of the exits and put them in a driving directions application.
This is hilarious. When you try to get driving directions between Trondheim and Haugesund in Norway, two cities about an 11 hour drive apart, Mappoint suggests a driving route that leads you through seven different countries (the U.K., France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden). It
The Government of India launched IncredibleIndia.org last week.
A nice looking website, but lacks maps and pictures. Information looks like a copy and paste from brochures.
It was going to happen sooner or later that somebody would launch a travel deal RSS feed. So here it is, Pheedz.com has RSS feeds for Europe, Asia, Cruises and more.
This is the future of online marketing, especially if we don’t deal with the Spam problem soon. This is the ultimate opt-in. Only receive feeds that I want to see, without any $%&* I’m not interested in. I have to get going on this for our website.
Interesting article about the lack of Vietnamese travel information.
Consumer habits are changing and the media reports on it. But consumer habits are also changing because of media reporting on it. In this case Stephanie Nelson, of thecouponmom.com, joined ABC News
So here’s the plan. I’m going to buy a couple of these spheres, hang them in Stanley Park and fullfill a livelong dream of becoming an elf and live in Lothlorien. Hopefully my wife and cats agree.
The Japanese Tourism Authority is going to lend selected Tourist a PDA loaded with travel information and translation services. This is part of a campaign to promote Japan among Tourists who are intimidated by the Japanese language and high prices.
I think this is a very smart thing to do. Planning doesn’t stop when a trip begins and this is a perfect vehicle for cross-sell and up-sell during a consumer