John Battelle has a big scoop on Business 2.com: A9 has just announced A9 Yellow Pages. Well, what it is that when you do a search for say, Joe’s Pizza in San Francisco, not only does the information pop-up, but there is also a photograph of the Joe making the pizza.
A9 strapped GPS-enabled digital videocamera-cum-terabyte server rigs to the top of a bunch of SUVs, and drove them around the commercial districts of major U.S. metropolitan areas, recording what became composite still pictures of entire cities, one address at a time. Tens of thousands of miles later, they had more than 20 million images of over 14 million businesses in 10 cities, and they aren’t done yet. A9 then created a local search application it calls Block View. It’s pretty darn cool, incorporating a lot of Javascript and other tricks to let you “walk” up and down the block. (You can’t turn a corner yet, but you can look at the other side of the street.) A9 then integrated Block View with Yellow Pages listings (from Axiom) and voilà — local search with a visual cue.
Now as an aside, think about this application – take away broadband – and what you will get is you screaming profanities like Donald Duck. Broadband, its the glue that makes every cool thing happen!
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A9 Yellow Pages are out
Many posts around about A9 releasing an interesting implementation of Yellow Pages functionality. First post I read was Om’s, with some comments from Techdirt and Russ, and a full story from CNET. As Russ mentioned for Spain, French yellow pages
Amazon A9’s Visual Yellow Pages
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: David Warner
“Joe’s Pizza?”
“Wrong number.”
;^)
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: leo prieto
Wow I loved the idea. It’s not that hard to do really (just a lot of time, if you want to do it by yourself). I want to build something like that myself, for Santiago (and later the rest of Chile). Seriously. Really impressed.
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: umair
that is *really* cool.
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Anand Jain
After initially poking around the new A9 Block View feature, I kinda scratched my head and started wondering how are they going to monetize this service? I mean, obviously all the big players out there offer Yellow Pages as well as location based searches. So what am I missing in here? How many times would I want to view the ‘other businesses’ around ‘Joes Pizza place’? Other than the cool factor, whats the value addition? Can someone fill me in?
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