reDesign

I was meeting some colleagues and partners last night for the Pistons playoff game. As we sat down for drinks, we realized that we’d left the tickets at our hotel – more than an hour away from the Palace. Six small pieces of paper were tucked in a blue backpack and there was no way to get there and back without missing most of the game.

We could get the hotel staff to find the tickets and send them to us by cab, but that would take at least an hour and we’d have to count on the cab driver not taking off with the prized tickets. (Which were worth a lot more than the $100 cab fare.)

A quick call to the box office and we found a solution: if we could fax the tickets to the box office, they would reprint them. A fax glitch later, we had three of our tickets. (Only one page went through.) Fortunately, I had a digital image of the fax in my email account and the Palace box office also does email.

As this experience illustrates, sports and entertainment venues are rapidly coming into the digital world. Being able to handle situations like this dramatically improves the guest experience and reduces costs for the venue:

• Tickets purchased directly from the venue can often be reprinted with just a credit card.
• Print-at-home ticketing eliminates mailing costs and reduces the number of people needed to staff will call windows. (Note that this doesn’t mean reduced costs for you, because the ticketing companies charge for this service.)
• The San Francisco Giants Ticket Relay allows you to transfer tickets electronically to someone else. If you decide at the last minute that you can’t go to a game, you can transfer the tickets by email and your friend can pick them up at a kiosk.
• The Washington Nationals are experimenting with mobile phone ticketing that sends a scannable 2-D bar code to your phone.The current technology is too kludgy to be useful, but it will get better.

Digital ticketing also allows venues to generate additional revenue. At the Boston Symphony, season subscribers can electronically return tickets for a tax deduction. Those tickets are then resold.

Major League Baseball’s deal with StubHub allows ticket resales even on the day of the game. (For StubHub tickets that can’t be transferred digitally the market dries up based on FedEx’s schedule.) And, of course, MLB gets a cut. Those extra butts in seats also help to pad concession revenues.

There’s an additional benefit to the venues: digital ticketing increases the risk of buying tickets from scalpers. An “authentic” ticket could have been invalidated electronically.

I expect that we’ll also see more last minute deals offered by email and mobile phone to fill seats at underperforming events.

The announced Microsoft bid for Yahoo! means a lot of different things for lots of people. An emboldened competitor for Google. A stronger ad network for advertisers. Heightened acquisition hopes for AOL. Better benefits for Yahoo! employees. (Microsoft has the best benefits I’ve seen in the industry.)

But what does it mean for every day consumers? The biggest impact is likely to be in the mobile space. Microsoft’s ownership of the Windows Mobile OS and Yahoo’s large audience and mobile applications could revolutionize the industry.

As revolutionary as the iPhone is, it’s not a true network device. Apple did a terrific job integrating four devices – phone, Internet tablet, media player and camera – into one.

Even as our lives get more and more digitally connected, the cell phone remains a remote island of information. Someone needs to build a device that integrates the Internet seamlessly.

Some of the things I’d like to see:

• A network address book. You no longer have to use the 10-key keypad or a sync cable to keep your address book up-to-date. In fact, you don’t have to update it all – as your contacts move, those changes are automatically reflected. The address book would incorporate network presence so that you don’t call people when they’re in the middle of something.
• A network calendar.
• Integrated photo applications. I’ve been looking for a way to view pictures from my friends on flickr through my mobile phone or iPod Touch. The best efforts have been clunky. When I take pictures, they’re seamlessly integrated with my flickr account, without the hacks that are currently required. (Sprint has done a nice implementation of this kind of integration with Picture Mail, but their Web application is awful and little used.) The pictures could also be used for picture Caller ID.
• Richer data push to the phone. It amazes me that we’re still stuck sending 160 character text messages to each other. A network-integrated phone would allow for a better experience. Want to invite someone to dinner? Send them a message which appears complete with photo, address, review and link to driving directions.
• Web access to text messages and integration with IM. When you’re at your desk, text messages come in on your IM client. Leave and they get routed to your cell phone. All of your texts are available in your mail app. The carriers are an obstacle to making this happen (text messaging is highly lucrative), but a combined Microsoft-Yahoo might be able to pull it off.
• Network control of your phone. Phone stolen? No problem, send a bullet to erase all of the data. Forgot where you left your phone? See a map of where it is.
• Local search integration. Found a business that you like? Add it your network address book for quick and easy access. Click to rate right from your cell phone.
• Location-aware presence. The option to publish location to other networks, including IM networks. More on that later.

Some variations of a few of these features, like the network address book and calendar, exist in enterprise-focused devices. Yahoo! Go is an excellent consumer application that includes features such as a flickr viewer, but without integration into the OS isn’t as great as it should be.

Microsoft’s ownership of the phone OS, deep integration of Yahoo! Go and their combined consumer audiences could be combined to create a phone that out Apples Apple.

See also:

• iPhone as your social network
• Remote control for your cell phone

ObDisclaimer: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of my employer.

Update: If you’re looking for deep dish pizza near O’Hare, see my step-by-step guide to Gino’s East on Higgins.

Having gone to school in Chicago, I love deep dish pizza. Unfortunately, there’s no Carmen’s or Giordano’s in the D.C. area. The last time I had good Chicago-style pizza was when my friend Jason flew in a few Giordano’s pies for his Super Bowl party. (The Colts were are also represented with tenderloins.)

I was connecting through O’Hare today and wanted to get some deep dish at the airport. I asked Google for “deep dish pizza at o’hare”. No luck.

This is a really difficult query for search engines. It seems simple, but it has a lot of components that make it tricky. But it’s exactly the kind of query that search engines should be able to handle.

Breaking apart the components of the query, we have:

“deep dish pizza” is a distinct concept. It’s different from “New York pizza,” “Sicilian pizza,” and “Indiana pizza”. (I don’t know what that is, but my friend Wanita swears there’s such a thing.) I could restrict my query using quotation marks around the phrase “deep dish pizza” but I shouldn’t have to do that. On the other hand, “deep dish pizza” is close enough to “Chicago-style pizza” that those results should be included.

The second part of my query was “at”. Search engines typically treat words like “at” “and” “near” and “or” either as filler and ignore them, or they use them as Boolean operators. There’s a big difference between the query “deep dish pizza at o’hare” and “deep dish pizza near o’hare”. With 90 minutes between flights, “near” doesn’t work.

“O’Hare” is also tricky. It’s a known place with a physical address. But Google and other search engines know it as ORD or 10000 Bessie Coleman Dr, Chicago, IL 60666. Compare the results for “deep dish pizza o’hare” with those for “deep dish pizza ORD“. Frequent travelers might shortcut to ORD, but again, that’s not a burden users should have to bear.

The answer, in theory, lies in natural language search. I’ve written before about how search engines force people to think like computers. Natural language search tries to teach computers to think like people. The most talked about company in the space is Powerset. I saw a controlled demonstration of their technology in August, but the promised fall public beta has yet to materialize.

Keyword-based search engines fake some of this by using tricks like stemming, synonyms and anchor text. With the uptake of sites like Yahoo! Answers and the sheer volume of information on the Web, there’s a decent chance that someone has phrased the question the same way. In the search results page for my original query, one of the results was a Frommer’s Q&A.

In addition to the structural challenges of queries like this, there’s also the challenge of how data is gathered. Data providers do a terrible job of gathering information about a place that’s really a collection of places — such as malls and airports. In some cases, information is simply not collected. In others, the information that is collected isn’t sufficiently descriptive. The physical addresses of these businesses aren’t meaningful to users. “Terminal 1, Gate C3″ makes sense; 10000 Bessie Coleman Dr, Chicago, IL 60666 does not.

OK, how many geeks are pulling out their laptops and doing searches like this you ask? Not a lot. And in search from the Web, it’s relatively easy to re-do the query and keep tweaking it until you get an answer.

Getting better answers faster becomes increasingly important as search moves to mobile devices and with voice-based search from the likes of Tellme and Google’s GOOG-411. In those environments, the penalty for failure is much higher. Users can’t easily tweak queries. They can’t browse endless Web sites to try to get the answer. They need the algorithms to do the work for them.

I was finally able to find out about pizza options at O’Hare by going to the O’Hare Web site and looking at a PDF map of Terminal 1. There isn’t a deep dish pizza place in Terminal 1, though there are Pizzeria Unos in other terminals.

The pyschic search engine would know that Pizzeria Uno is not an answer that works for me.

More on: local search, search, wireless

Google has integrated AIM into its chat in Gmail, delivering what Google and AOL announced nearly two years ago when they renewed their search deal and Google invested $1 billion in AOL.

The integration is not true interoperability, like what exists between Yahoo! and MSN’s IM products. Google/AIM works like a multi-headed client, such as Trillian or Pidgin. In order to chat with someone on AIM, you must have an AIM account. You provide your AIM account information and Google logs you into AIM and displays your AIM Buddy List integrated with your Google buddies. (AIM buddies have the AOL running man icon next to them.)

The integration worked reasonably well. I could see and chat with my buddies. Just as with Google buddies, chats were automatically stored in my Gmail account. Unfortunately, the indexing is less than optimal. If a user’s screenname is “jsmith2000923″ but displays as “John Smith,” you can only search by “jsmith2000923.”

Another flaw is that AIM’s mobile indicators don’t show up reliably. You might think that someone is available, when they’re really just available on their mobile phones.

A bonus with the addition of AIM integration is that you can use AIM to send SMS messages from within Gmail. Just add the phone number as an AIM buddy.

The AIM integration isn’t yet incorporated into Google’s downloadable client, Google Talk. Without carpet bombing the United States 100x over with CDs, it seems Google Talk hasn’t gotten a lot of traction. Given that Google was very late to the IM party, I suspect that many of the people likely to download Google Talk use Trillian or Pidgin instead.

That’s OK, because integrating chat into Gmail was a genius move. It drew many Gmail users into Google’s chat and I know a few people who went from just Google Talk users to Gmail users. In the two years since the announcement, I’ve seen many of my non-AOL friends become Google chat users.

I already run Pidgin at startup on my computers, so this integration isn’t critical for me. But it will be useful when using someone else’s computer. Now I can just log into Gmail and have access to my Google and AIM buddies. This poses a threat to Web-based IM providers such as Meebo. (Meebo does a whole lot more, but this might be “good enough” for many people.)

That still leaves out my Yahoo! and Microsoft buddies. Sadly, this is one of the few areas where the Web companies have trailed the wireless carriers. Wireless operators in the United States have had true interoperability for several years now. But they had a financial incentive to do it: they charge for each message sent and received.

Disclosure: I worked at AOL Search.

See also:

• Gmail <3 AIM (Google Blog)
• Google Talk + AIM = Now! (Justin Uberti’s blog)

More on: AOL, Google, SMS

In a first for the U.S. pizza market, Papa John’s is now letting you order your carbs by text message.

This won’t work for last-minute cravings. You have to create an online account at papajohns.com and pre-configure the pies that you might want someday. Just in case your pizza tastes vary from time to time, you can configure up to four favorite orders.

It sounds like way more work than it’s worth. But that’s what I think of their online ordering system and yet an astonishing 20% of Papa John’s orders come from the Web site. I’ve used it a few times, but it’s generally easier to pick up the phone.

An added bonus (for Papa John’s) on SMS orders: you pay full menu price instead of getting their latest specials. With specials frequently knocking 40-50% off an order, that could be a lot of dough.

I travel frequently and have friends scattered throughout the country. I usually do a bad job of keeping track of who is where, who has moved, etc.

Last week I was in Boston. As I headed out to dinner, I updated my Facebook status:

Later that night, I got a Facebook message from a friend I haven’t seen since high school. He lives in Cambridge and wanted to get together.

Unfortunately, the message arrived after I had gotten back to my hotel.

This almost-connection was facilitated by Facebook’s social graph and status updates. Next time I’m in Boston, I know to look Chike up. Twitter, Jaiku (acquired by Google) and Pownce can be used in the same way. But none of them know geography; they require that someone look at the message and determine that Cambridge is nearby. A friend who lives in Los Angeles is just as likely to see that message as someone in Cambridge.

There are a number of companies trying to turn that missed connection into an actual connection. Among them are Loopt, uLocate and Whrrl. Google purchased a pioneer in the field — Dodgeball — but hasn’t done much with it. (Dodgeball’s founders very publicly left Google, complaining that they couldn’t get engineering resources.)

Although the details vary based on site, you can publish your location from the Web or a cell phone. You can also see where your friends are on a map. I could have checked a map before I headed to Cambridge to see which of my friends were nearby. Some services will even alert you when a friend is nearby.

More on: location-based services, maps

Disclosure: I have a consulting relationship with uLocate.

My friend Jason ran in the Marine Corps Marathon yesterday. The marathon, like many races, uses a chip on runners’ shoes to track times.

The Marine Corps Marathon also offered runner alerts: you could sign up before the race to get alerts when your runner hit the 5-, 10-, 13.1-, 15-, 19-, 22- and 26.2-mile marks. A chip reader would scan your runner and then send a text message or email. It makes it easier to position yourself to find your runner in the crowd, just camp out a mile or so ahead of the checkpoint and the system would let you know when to keep your eyes peeled.

That’s the theory, anyway. In reality, the system failed miserably. We got an alert when Jason crossed the 5-mile mark. More than 90 minutes later, we were still waiting for the 10-mile alert. Did Jason get hurt? Did we miss him? I called a friend to check the Web site. Same data. We looked up another friend and the system showed that she’d crossed the 15-mile mark. Uh oh.

We continued to wait and eventually saw him just before the 16-mile mark. Still no alerts past the original.

The alerts eventually showed up. After the race, the system blasted numerous duplicate messages: 96 Jason alerts to one phone.

The race announcer said more than 200,000 people had signed up to receive alerts. Multiply that by 96 and that’s a lot of text messaging revenue.

washingtonpost.com made good use of simpler technology. Runners can watch three hours of video of the finish line. Now if they’d start geotagging their photos, you could create cool maps like this.

More on: geotagging, newspapers

Location-based services have been hampered by the balkanization of carrier networks and a focus on mobile-only implementations. LocPoke, a new Facebook application, is a promising alternative.

I’ve written before about WHERE, a location service platform that has offered GPS-based location status updates for Twitter using a downloadable application. The application is available for Sprint and Alltel phones for a monthly fee.

WHERE’s LocPoke, allows you to show a map of your location on your Facebook profile. This application addresses many of the key barriers to adoption of the Where platform: it works on any network, it works on any phone, it doesn’t require a download and it’s free (except for SMS charges).  Just text your location to the SMS shortcode WHERE (94373) to update your location. The location can be set as a street address, ZIP code, city or neighborhood.

You can also text a phone number to identify your location. If you’re having dinner at Azie, you can text “dinner@4155380918” and the map will show the name and address of Azie. This method is too cumbersome to get wide adoption, but it points to a future where we’ll be sending actionable data instead of freeform text.

Friends can also prompt you to update your location. A friend clicking on the “LocPoke” button triggers an SMS prompting you to update your location. This capability can be limited to friends that you select. I’d like to see the option to click on the location to get driving directions.

The Social Map feature allows you to see where your friends are. It’s of limited use until LocPoke takes off.

Sprint has released an enhanced version of its search that allows users to tap into their phone’s location when doing searches. The search feature is powered by Microsoft’s Live Search.

The first time user experience isn’t exactly intuitive. When doing a search off Sprint’s portal, one of the layers that comes back is “Local” clicking again to “Go Local” then asks whether you want to enter a location or “Find Me.” Selecting “Find Me” renders a release authorizing Sprint to give your location to Microsoft. The results that come back after all this (my query term was “Target”) still show ringtones and screen savers above the local results.

Search results aren’t sorted in any discernible order. Usually in local search, results are sorted by distance from the starting point or alphabetically. These are neither.

The authorization to use “Find Me” can be stored for a session, day, 30 days or unlimited, making return visits easier.

A link labeled “Get Precise GPS Location” offers users of select phones the option to download a Java applet. Instead of typing out what you’re looking for, you can speak the name of the business or the category.

Although category names (restaurants, bars, Mexican restaurants, movie theaters) worked fine, business names did not. Of the dozen or so names I tried, only “Cheesecake Factory,” “Target” and “Dominos” returned the results I was expecting. These terms are so common that many data providers treat them as categories.

It seems that the browser-based search uses triangulation from the towers to calculate location, whereas the application uses GPS from your handset.

Despite its flaws, it’s still a significant move. This is the first time I know of that a U.S. carrier has offered location-enabled search for free.

Update: The Java application also can tap into the phone’s address book. If you find a business and want to share it, just pick a name from the phone’s address book and send.

More on: GPS, wireless data

Recommended reading:

• Sprint press release
• Sprint And Microsoft Extend Mobile Partnership, Offer New Services (Search Engine Land, includes screenshots of Java app)

The iPhone has quickly become the ultimate communication device for many. With a few tweaks, it could easily become the ultimate navigation device.

Creative Commons image by stevegarfield.

Imagine:

• You get into your car and put the iPhone in you iCar dock. As you drive, music from the iPhone wafts through your car’s stereo system using either a hard wire or FM transmitter (built in to the dock). The track information displays on the iPhone screen.
• A friend calls. Her picture and number shows on the iPhone screen. The music fades and you’re connected to her over Bluetooth. She invites you to dinner. “Text me the address,” you say. Moments later, the iPhone receives the address and asks you if you want to go there.
• The iPhone shows you turn-by-turn directions on Google Maps. The music resumes.
• The Google Maps traffic data show an accident ahead. The iPhone alerts you and prompts you to re-route.
• As you near your destination, images from Google Street View appear to confirm that you’re in the right place.
• You arrive at your destination and find parking three blocks away. Snap the iPhone out of the dock and the driving directions automatically turn in to walking directions.
• After dinner, you take a picture with the iPhone and upload it to flickr. The location data is automatically added and it shows up on your flickr map.
• You forgot where you parked your car. No problem, the iPhone remembers and guides you back. (OK, this part won’t work if you parked in an underground garage — you’ll get back to the garage entrance, but then you’re on your own.)

Technology-wise, most of what’s needed for the above scenario is already in place. GPS is the key missing piece. You would also want HSPDA to speed up the map data. The connoisseur would want Bluetooth A2DP for the music.

How much will this cost? I’d expect the service to cost $0-$10 a month. Wireless carriers have typically charged about $10 a month for navigation service. Verizon and Sprint have started to bundle navigation services with their high-end data plans.

The incremental hardware cost for the GPS chip is negligible. Apple could tack on an extra $50 and make a killing. Add on early-adopter pricing of $100 for the iCar dock and the $150 is still cheaper than most standalone nav systems.

Portable navigation devices from companies like Garmin, Magellan and TomTom have become hot as prices have plummeted to around $250. I took a road trip last month and a significant percentage of cars had navigation screens hanging from their windshields.

It’s expected that PNDs will become a billion dollar market this year. A GPS-enabled iPhone could rapidly take share in that market.

See also:

• Top trends and predictions for satellite navigation

More on: Apple, Google, iPhone, satellite navigation