Chandu Thota - Blog

Center'd on mevio

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:39:00 +0000

Just saw mevio's coverage on Center'd! Pretty cool that Neha thinks we are a 3.0! :)

Check out the coverage here (@10.25).

What's new in iPhone 3.1 SDK?

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:34:00 +0000

Just got a note from Apple that iPhone 3.1 SDK (beta) is up on dev center. So what's new in this SDK?

What's New
• Organizer: the iPhone Development grouping now collects crash logs, install
bundles, and provisioning profiles in a single location
• iPhone OS 3.1 Simulator uses frameworks more closely matching the device
• Toolbar uses a single popup to choose platform, target, and debug/release

We are just getting started on 3.0 and not sure if a minor version upgrade is justified for these updates :)

You can read the full readme on dev center.

So long, Rajeev

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:01:00 +0000

I'm still shocked, saddened and trying to come to terms with the reality - Rajeev Motwani passed away earlier today.

I feel very fortunate to have crossed paths with Rajeev - he was not only an advisor/investor in my company, but also a true mentor; it was just a couple of weeks ago I exchanged emails with him to meet up for a coffee at University Coffee Cafe. Life is unfair.

R.I.P Rajeev, you will be truly missed.

Google Rich Snippets, Information Discovery and Open Web

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:04:00 +0000

This week Google launched rich snippets support which allows website owners to include interesting content by including structured data (such as Microformats and RDF) into their webpages. While this has been done before by Yahoo! Search Monkey before, this move from Google got a lot of attention because of it's market share in search and how it can positively impact the traffic to a website with interesting and unique content. So I was genuinely excited to see what this is all about and see how we can integrate the rich local data that we have at Center'd into snippets. And I was a bit disappointed after learning more about what this can do in general. Here is why.

According to the Google webmaster's blog post, they have describe the process as below:

Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It's a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Now we're beginning the process of opening up this successful experiment so that more websites can participate. As a webmaster, you can help by annotating your pages with structured data in a standard format.

Great - sounds simple right? Now look at the currently supported formats here in their documentation, this whole thing is limited to Reviews, People, Products and Businesses and Organizations - that's it? That seems to be a very limited set of structured data formats to express web in a structured format! And if you dig a bit deeper, even for this types of datasets the schema is very restrictive. Let's pick Businesses and Organizations for example, the following are the properties that are "supported":

Google recognizes the following Organization properties, and may include their content in search results. Where the RDFa Organization and microformats hCard property names differ, the hCard property name appears in parentheses.

name(org/name)
The name of the business. If you use microformats, you should use both org andname, and ensure that these have the same value.

url
Link to a web page
address (adr)
The location of the business
street-address
The street address. Child of address.
locality
The city. Child of address.
region
The geographic region. Child of address.
postal-code
The postal code. Child of address.
country-name
The country. Child of address.
tel
The telephone number

Now, that's disappointing - this level of limited support of structured data is not going to help users or publishers because it's going to aggregate all websites to a common denominator!

Consider this: let's say that you are looking for a restaurant in San Francisco. And let's assume there are 3 different websites that have three different data about this place. Say website A has ratings information, website B has menu information and website C has supported activity related information. When you run the query in google what would you expect to see? You want to find out as much information as possible such as reviews, menu and service related info from all 3 websites that have that info - but in the current model where every web site is forced to express their "structured data" with a limited set of fields you would see exactly similar and almost duplicative information. Note that no one is gaining in this process: the content publishers or the websites lost their uniqueness and the users are not getting the full information that they want to get.

Now I buy the argument that the standards can be extended and also it's impossible for anyone to define "structured format" that can fit every bit of information that's present on the web. That's why I am kind of "old-school" in thinking that we need to get smarter about mining this data using machines. Web is open by definition because there are no rigid rules about expressing content and the intent underneath. That's what makes web so much more fascinating - there is all kinds of data that is to be understood, mined and re-surfaced at end-points such as search engines. So putting a rigid structure at discovery level (i.e. search engines) we lose the open-ness of the web. Keyword search is already a limiting paradigm in discovering information since you can never discover content that you can't define (in a keyword) - now by hiding information that's not structured, you will never know what you would have discovered accidentally.

Hopefully that won't happen with this semantic web push from Google.

Related: Great discussions at Tim O'Reilly's radar and Ian Davis's blog on this topic.

Disclaimer: At Center'd we have unique data about a place's capabilities (such as is it good for kids, is it romantic etc) in a structured format and it cannot be currently expressed in the proposed solution. I have contacted Google about this issue and will update if I hear back :)

Can you please tell me your intent? Says Google with Search Options

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:35:00 +0000

Tons of news coming on the new Google Search Options release; Google Search options is a "tool belt" that can be used to organize the search results based on ones intent Google says. This is a significant step in a new direction for Google, a direction that seems to be openly admitting a couple of things:

a. "guessing" user's intent is super-hard

b. relevance is not uni-dimensional anymore (yes, Pagerank only represents only a fraction of it)

Hence let the user control what/how they want to see the information. Looks plain and simple - right? No - there is more.

While the usefulness of this tool is going to be limited for the end-users in "organizing" the search results - there is a significant bit of "learning data" that Google will be able to collect about keyword queries and the related user's intent with all the billions of click-streams flowing through the Search Options. This is exactly how they beat the first round of "web search" game - and it's time for the second round, perhaps?

Is this about real-time search?

Many bloggers screaming and shouting that this is all about real-time search (and by definition as answer to twitter search!) - I disagree. While recency (or real-time-ness) is a dimension of the new web search relevance paradigm, it's not all about that. This fundamental shift in the relevance paradigm is going to force all of us to think about alternative ways to "crawl" and index the web - and it is forcing Google too. The problem we are just beginning to notice with "real-time" search is a problem waiting to happen for a long-time.

Web is full of spam - it takes a bit of learning for any search engine to figure out how to differentiate between spam content and real content - and Google was far ahead of this learning curve with their brilliant feedback systems built into their search results - each time user clicks on a link from the search results, it was counted as a vote of confidence - that coupled with volume - they built an un-beatable asset - world's largest and finest uni-dimensional relevance database for the web (don't under-estimate the power of this database - they had billions of these clicks recorded across the web way before Microsoft even started building their search engine). Now with the evolution of new relevance paradigm that includes relevance as we know it and also the new dimensions such as time, location, rich-media and so on, there is a need for more detailed and elaborate feedback system that enables users to express their intent so that it can be captured, processed, understood and applied back to the web - and Google Search Options is just one way of doing that.

What does this mean? New world of search is in order - perhaps we need a hybrid of "crawl/index" and "subscribe/index" - perhaps HTTP and XMPP should be integrated into a new kind of web servers that can serve and notify of the content at the same time, perhaps search is push instead of pull? What does this mean for SEO? :) I can go on and on and on here - all this indicates one thing for sure - web is still evolving, web still is full of spam (now even real-time - get that! :) and we need a new way to organize web's information.

Photo: intent by outlier*

On my mind: romantic things to do in new york

Google news update- Spam vs. Relevance

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 12 May 2009 05:50:00 +0000

Today Google News launched an update to the service that included a "detail" page that organized salient sources with enhanced content such as photos, timelines, and quotes. I love Google news, but not sure if I like this addition. I use Google news regularly and I find this new update confusing.

TechCurnch said its an issue with the algorithm and went on to compare TechMeme with Google news. As a geek that plays with document clustering in more than one domain I don't think its a pure algo issue. The issue seems to be primarily around filtering the spam (or including stories that are less "authentic" - but still very strongly related - do you see the difference?). But that's a problem that can be solved easily in a number of different ways (of course the easiest way is to follow Techmeme's approach where you crawl only a known set of sources). But I must admit that I'm surprised to see that the Google QA teams let this slip through. I also still don't get why the detail page contains grouping of news based on the location. Any ideas on why that is being done?

Overall, I think this release is a bit of a disappointment, but hey, its still a great way to browse news on the web, especially in mother tongue telugu!

On my mind:kid friendly restaurants in san francisco

Plan like a true local!

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:01:00 +0000

Today we rolled out a new release on Center'd that introduces "Flavored Local Technology" - a machine learning based approach to classify local places of interest based on conversations on the web from locals. We have been providing the collaboration and planning tools for almost an year now and the addition of this technology and the related tools should help you plan from a casual plan (where to go dinner tonight with kids) to an elaborate plan (how to organize the summer picnic at school). And that is exactly what we would love to do - help you plan your life's activities.

Intent based activity search is one of the best ways to approach casual local planning problem - it is a new kind of local search with activities or things to do being the primary focus; and if you think about it activities are driven by the intent - when you look for a restaurant, you have a specific intent (say romantic?); when you look for an attraction you have a specific intent (say group friendly?); when you search for things to do (say kid friendly?), you have an itent; today with this release, we are launching five (5) supported intent "styles": kid friendly, romantic, group friendly, outdoor and "recession buster" (aka cheap) to make it easy to find places that fit into popular "categories" such as eat (restaurants etc), visit (attractions), attend (local events) and shop (shopping).

Crawling the web for local conversations and understanding the intent/activity behind them is a huge task - eventhough we used the cloud-computing goodness with Amazon EC2 compute clusters - there is simply not enough time to get everything done right - so we are rolling out this release in the following top 12 cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC. Other cities will follow soon. Of course, we still have the local search enabled for other cities, but we just haven't finished processing the data yet. So, give it a try and give us feedback!

I'm excited the way this has come together - incredibly hard-working team (can you believe all the development was done by just 4 engineers?) coupled with my learnings from IR tinkering put to work to solve a good problem: enabling global access to local knowledge. Now you be the judge - give us a try and let us know!

Here is the copy of the full press release:

Center’d Unveils “Flavored Local” Search – New Approach to Local Planning

Filters Content by Intent

Develops Unique Activity-Based Search Index of More than 1 Million Places

Intent-Based Styles Including “Kid-Friendly” and “Recession Buster” Help People Quickly Find Things to Do That Meet Their Needs

APRIL 28, 2008 – MENLO PARK, CA – Center’d (http://www.centerd.com), the Web site that helps people plan life’s activities, today released new tools, features and data that help people find things to do in local areas based on their intent. By analyzing millions of conversations about places on the Web, Center’d has created a unique index of more than 1 million places that are classified by activity intent, including kid-friendly, romantic, cheap, and more. This allows people to quickly discover places and activities that best suit their needs while short-cutting the overload of unstructured local data on the Internet. To highlight the new personal planning information and tools, Center’d has redesigned and enhanced many areas of its site.

“Consumers want a faster way to find local activities that meet their needs without having to visit multiple sites and sift through hundreds of reviews. Our unique activity index and personal planning features help solve this problem and complement our existing group collaboration tools,” said Jennifer Dulski, co-founder and chief executive officer of Center’d. “In addition to solving a consumer pain point, this new approach to local search also positions us well to provide advertisers and publishers with more relevant solutions to engage audiences and monetize content.”

A Novel Approach to Local Search

Center’d created its unique activity-based index using innovative natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technology to analyze millions of conversations across the Web. The index includes inputs from local review sites, aggregators, and blogs through feeds and publicly available sources, as well as data from plans people make using group collaboration tools on Center’d. Based on its data analysis, Center’d has integrated 5 intent classification “styles” on its site which include kid-friendly, group-friendly, romantic, cheap, and outdoor. As data continues to be analyzed and classified, more intent styles will be made available on the site.

People can currently find information about restaurants, attractions, shopping and events across the intent styles in a number of new or enhanced areas of the site:

Enhanced Search: Center’d has built upon its ability to filter search results by people’s social graph and added filters for intent styles, which yields more accurate results for activity-based searches compared to standard keyword search.

New City Pages: Center’d has created city guides for 12 major cities where people can browse things to do by intent style and place category. This allows consumers to get a view of a city filtered by their personal needs. For example, each city guide will have a kid-friendly style page with restaurants, attractions, events and movies that are suitable for children. The new city pages also feature editorial content from bloggers with local expertise that complements the intent styles.

Updated Place Profiles: To give people a faster understanding of a business or attraction, place profile pages now include the most popular “snippets” of web conversations, organized by themes such as service and ambiance. These snippets are coupled with sentiment graphs that show what percent of comments are positive, neutral or negative. Together these tools give people a quick way to determine the tone of Web conversations about a place.

Redesigned Home Page: The new Center’d home page highlights enhanced functionality which includes activity styles and personal planning features, as well as existing group collaboration tools. People can quickly pick a style (e.g., romantic) and type of activity (e.g., restaurants) that suit their needs, and Center’d will present relevant search results.

“Distilling the unstructured data available on the web about local places and events is a mammoth task. The technology we’ve built to address this provides a foundation for us to deliver unique mobile and Web applications to consumers and partners going forward,” said Chandu Thota, co-founder and chief technology officer of Center’d. “The investment we have made in developing this unique index will prove an increasingly unique competitive advantage as we continue to scale our business.”

New Data Helps People Save Money

As part of the 5 intent classification styles announced today, Center’d has included a “cheap” category designed to help people save money while still enjoying local activities during the recession. Based on people’s Web conversations Center’d has identified places that are inexpensive, have special promotions or that are free in general. Places listed in this category include things like cheap restaurants, museums with free admission days, parks and free events, among other places and activities. People can find cheap things to do in their local area by conducting a search from the new home page, browsing a city guide page, or by filtering search results.

In conjunction with this product release, Center’d has created partner APIs which are currently available by contacting the company directly at bd(at)centerd(dot)com.

About Center’d

Center’d (http://www.centerd.com) helps people plan life’s activities. The company has developed personal planning features and group collaboration tools that help people plan any type of activity, from finding and discovering things to do, to organizing and coordinating complex events. Using natural language processing and machine learning, Center’d has created a proprietary activity index that allows people to find things to do based on their intent. This unique approach and its proprietary activity index enable Center’d to deliver a more relevant and personalized local experience.

Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Center’d is led by former Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon executives, and is funded by Norwest Venture Partners and KeyNote Ventures.

###

MEDIA CONTACT

Dan Visnick

Center’d

dan@centerd.com

Change

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:52:00 +0000

Mahatma Gandhi once said "You must be the change you want to see in the world" - at Center'd, individually and collectively we do believe in it as you can see Jennifer Dulski's blog post this morning.

Today, after watching President Obama taking the oath there is only one thing on my mind: change.

Change is refreshing - it forces you to challenge your own assertions; it makes you feel incomplete at the very moment it arrives and leaves you hungry for more. It brings in a sense of uncertainty that gives rise to hope and the renewed sense of direction - the change witnessed by billions of people across the globe today is just that. What a day!

Photo theme: Hope is Change / Photo Credit: joel.childs / On my mind: The White House

Need help in organizing your school events?

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:16:00 +0000

At Center'd, we can help! We just launched a school events portal to help you busy parents, teachers and volunteers! You can see the details our press release, or you can read the entire release below:

#########################

Menlo Park, CA (PRWEB) January 13, 2009 -- Center'd (http://www.centerd.com), the website that helps people plan activities and events of any kind, today unveiled a school event planning center designed to help people plan and coordinate any type of school event, from classroom parties to school fundraisers, to recurring volunteer needs and more. New resources include quick-start planning templates that people can easily copy and customize to meet their own needs, and enhanced sign-up sheet functionality that makes it easier for organizers to manage and coordinate volunteers. The school event planning center is now available at: http://www.centerd.com/plans/s/school-events/.

Planning Tools Designed to Help Busy Parents:
Since its public launch in June 2008, Center'd has provided busy adults with time-saving tools to plan any type of activity or event. The new planning center provides parents of school-age children with one place where they can find everything they need to plan and coordinate any type of school event. It includes the following features in addition to the existing planning tools offered by Center'd:

Enhanced Sign-Up Sheets: Center'd enables parents and schools to easily recruit and manage volunteers, eliminating the need to use paper sign-up sheets, spreadsheets, and other time-consuming methods. Center'd has improved the usability of its sign-up sheets, including additional editing features, which make it easier to manage multiple and recurring tasks. Center'd makes sure people stay on the same page by sending reminders to volunteers and alerts to organizers if someone backs out of a volunteer spot so it can be filled.

Quick-Start Templates: To help people get started on a plan quickly and easily, Center'd has developed an easy-to-use set of templates that people can copy and customize to meet their own needs in three simple steps. The new templates include guided tips to help organizers get a quick preview of how they can customize a specific plan's elements. The school center includes a dozen different types of school activity plan templates so people can easily plan events including a school auction, a book fair, a class party, and more. To preview all the templates, visit the school event planning center.

Specialized Customer Support: People who have any questions or need some help getting started can contact the resident school activity planning expert at Center'd, whose contact information is prominently displayed on the school event planning center.

"With spring right around the corner, many parents and teachers will be organizing activities such as picnics and annual fundraisers. By using our new planning resources, they can save time and have a more successful event." said Jennifer Dulski, co-founder and chief executive officer of Center'd. "The enhanced features and new templates we've developed to help schools are also extensible to other organizations that utilize volunteers, such as non-profits, religious organizations and teams."

What People Are Saying:
The planning tools from Center'd have already found a warm reception among people who plan school activities and events. Following is what a few school event organizers have said about Center'd:

Center'd is one of the best organizational tools I use as a room parent…

"Center'd is one of the best organizational tools I use as a room parent…" - Kim D., Mt. Clemens Montessori School, Mt. Clemens, MI

"Center'd has become an integral part of managing my son's school lunch volunteer program. It's the perfect solution…" - Rebecca W., Laurel Elementary School, Menlo Park, CA

"…I encourage all schools who depend on volunteers to embrace this resource - it makes it easy for volunteers to support your organization." - Lori F., Development Director, Keys School, Palo Alto, CA

For more information about the school resource center and features including quick-start templates, sign-up sheets, and guided tips, check out the new school event planning center.

About Center'd:
Center'd helps people make plans of any kind, from organizing casual activities like a night out with friends to coordinating complex events like a school fundraiser that needs dozens of volunteers. By integrating robust local search and planning tools, Center'd makes coordinating any activity or event seamless and easy. As people make plans, Center'd gathers enhanced data about places that will enable the company to make personalized plan recommendations. This unique approach creates a more relevant experience for consumers as well as more targeted and intent-based advertising opportunities for businesses. Center'd aims to give people all the tools they need to plan all of life's activities.

Led by former Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo! executives, Center'd is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and is funded by Norwest Venture Partners, KeyNote Ventures, and private angel investors.

Could Microsoft Tag be the catalyst for coupons online?

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:15:00 +0000

I was browsing the Microsoft news and found this interesting blog posts about Microsoft Tag in between Windows 7 R2 Beta launch and Ballmer's CES keynote.

What is Microsoft Tag? Simply put it's a new bar-code technology that let's you publish barcodes in print or web mediums that can later be "Scanned" by users using mobile phones to convert to it's original form. From Microsoft's website:

The sophisticated technology powering Microsoft Tag, High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCBs), was invented by Microsoft Research. It was designed from the ground up for maximum performance with the limited cameras on most mobile phones. Advanced image-processing techniques decode even out-of-focus barcode images, which means Microsoft Tag works with the fixed-focus camera lenses common in most mobile devices.

Funny, this whole thing reminds of a QR Code scanner prototype that I built (circa 2005, I was still at Microsoft) for Windows Mobile Camera phones to send and receive driving directions, business listing information etc - but the problems that the MSR team talks about (out of focus images, size of the image and so on) were precisely the reason why my application was abandoned.

But this is very cool stuff - technologies like this coupled with wide spread client software on a wide variety of mobile devices (Android, iPhone and Windows Mobile) could lead to new ways to distribute online coupons, especially in local space.

My head is already buzzing with ideas.

-- Chandu Thota, CTO/Co-Founder, Center'd

On my mind: Slanted Door San Francisco

Issues with Local Business Centers

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:58:00 +0000

Checking out the "local" blogs buzz this week, I noticed a number of blogs reporting about Google Local Business Center issues and why it's a failure. In his post, Mike says:

Google needs to understand that Local is different than Search, that accuracy is more important than relevance, and they need to embrace the business listing side of Maps if for no other reason than these folks are the future growth of Adwords. If it takes charging a monthly fee to have the resources to service this side of the business then so be it.

I agree in principle that the companies like Google and my ex-employer should strive to provide a better service (and any company for that matter :), but I'm not so sure about charging local businesses for that service. The problem that Mike is pointing out with Google is just a tip of the iceberg. The problem with local listing sites and pain that a small business owners feel as a result is much deeper and bigger. Why do I say that?

An online listing of a small business is an important identity that the small business owners deeply care about. They not only want to make sure they can be discovered online, but they also want to make sure that the listing information is accurate. Sounds reasonable? Ok, then to achieve that where do they need to go today? Google? Microsoft? Yahoo? Ask? YellowPages? Yelp? Localeze? Merchant Circle? Center'd? Or InfoUSA? All of them?

You see the issue? The issue is that the local directories are fragmented and the small business owners are already spending tons of time online to make sure their information is accurately presented on each and every site (at Center'd we do get a number of emails every single day from SMBs asking either to be listed or to correct the listing) - that is a huge distraction from running their business offline. Now if all these sites start charging them for having a basic listing and keeping it accurate - it's going to be a huge money sink as well. I'm not against charging small business owners for promoting their business once it is listed and accurate - but having an accurate listing is almost a right that they have and all the websites that do list these owe it to their owne users aswell - after all you don't want to give a wrong phone number or a wrong address when someone searches on your site.

So what do we really need to help small business owners? We need a federated service that let's a small business owner to create and control their identity online - then this service pings all the directories (that are registered to get updates) about the updates. Then each directory must sync the data automatically from the central listing created/controlled by the small business owner. The federated service must be free and should some-what be like Wikipedia (or a part of Wikipedia itself?). Sounds too simple? Yes, hard to archive? May be, but not impossible. There are issues around how entities are represented in each directory - a standards-based entity-definition system and a standards based data format (microformats) is key to realize this.

When we are seeing a broader trend to move towards an open, portable and standards-based protocols and data formats, isn't about time to make that "local move" too? What do you think? If you are passionate about this problem and want to do *something* about it, ping me - may be we can do something together!

-- Chandu Thota, CTO/Co-Founder, Center'd

On my mind: Central Market Dallas / Photo theme: Fragmented / Photo credit: Cats_mom

Reading lots of blogs and doing it fast!

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:03:00 +0000

Like many geeks, I read a lot of blogs in vertical categories such as web 2.0, social networking, cricket (the sport) etc, and also like many of us I'm pressed for time to read these feeds everyday. Existing feed readers such as google reader are not so helpful in summarizing my feeds such that I can get a snapshot of what's happening in each vertical; in essence what I need is a smart aggregator that organizes my feeds TechMeme style.

So, over a weekend, I dug up my old blogvia project that does the natural blog aggregation and clustering and put it to work to test if it can save time for me. The results are promising so far - the idea is that I create an OPML file from the feeds that I want to read and feed it to the blogvia crawler - and it fetches the feeds, analyzes them using NLP (natural language processing) techniques and aggregates them based on the similarity of the posts (or in other words clustering similar blog posts). You can see early results for local news, iphone and android news, Microsoft blogs, cricket news, mapping and geo news, and celebrity gossip (heck, why not!). If you see the results closely, they are not perfectly clustered, but still lets me scan over 1000 feeds in 15 minutes flat! and hey for a little time that I have spent its not that bad! :)

Talking about NLP stuff, We are also using NLP and Semantic stuff at Center'd to solve some of the local planning problems - Jen talked about what we are doing recently at an SDForum presentation - I will post more details as soon as they are available on our site. If you are using NLP stuff in local, I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can push for standards in creating semantic local web.

On my mind - Delfina San Francisco.

-- Chandu Thota, CTO/Co-Founder, Center'd

Photo theme: Clusters/Photo credit: Image Editor

Happy new year!

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:33:00 +0000

Hope your 2008 was a blast.

Year 2009 is going to be even more exciting - this is going to be an year that forces us to think and do what is much needed in these times: reinforced focus on creating meaningful and valuable products and technologies that push us forward in the right direction (i.e. no more sheep throwing and beer drinking applications).

I know that we are all waking up to rather grim news but there are a lot of things we need to be hopeful about.

Have a wonderful and happy new year 2009!

What are you doing this holidays?

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 08:35:00 +0000

So, the big question these days is what are your plans for the holidays, I say, nothing much, planning to hit code complete on for a couple of interesting features :), and plan fun things to do with 2Hs and T...

As an an online planning company, we want to make holiday planning easy and simple for you - so we even created a holiday planning center to pull all relevant content from different sections of our site. In this context, couple of days ago I came across a blog post by Isabel Adams that talked about how Center'd saved her time in getting her friends together for the holidays. In that post she said:

I absolutely hate planning things. Overwhelmed by the flurry of overlapping text messages (I'm more of a texter than a caller), the decisions of where to go and what to do, and the question of when everyone can hang out, I go crazy. Clearly, I should not consider event planning as a future career.

With Christmas Break approaching, I decided to look into potential ways to get my old group of friends together AND maintain my sanity. That led me to Center'd, an online planning tool centered on "people, places, and plans."...

That's precisely the reason why we created our tool set: from sign-up sheets to task lists to online invitations to place and time voting - we just want you to organize and plan things and keep your sanity - then Isabel continues and says:

Just by logging on I’m given suggestions for where to go or what to see! Plus, if I need to fall back on my tried-and-true locations, I can save them in my "Favorites" section for easy access in the future. Center'd also provides searches for holiday-themed events, has ready-made plans to help you through stressful situations (like finding gifts for everyone on your list), and allows you to "explore" your neighborhood and find restaurants, hotels, bakeries, and other businesses you might not have known about before.

There, in that simple paragraph, she summarized how discovery is a core part of making plans. And that's why we are tagging all things interesting to bring you places wherever we find them: from romantic places in San Francisco to fun places in Chicago to expensive places in New York - and of course, we also have my all time favorite Cafe Iberico Chicago on our site too ;-)

So, what are your plans for the holidays?

Whatever they are, make sure to plan well and be sure to have fun - happy holidays!

Photo credit: jmtimages

Google Maps Street View Update

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:47:00 +0000

Very cool updates from Google Maps for Street View this morning - I think the new interface is easier to use. RWW and other blogs are already reporting this welcoming update. While I still think that the Virtual Earth Bird's Eye View (yes, I'm still a bit biased) is richer with visuals when you are trying to get a sense of the physical world around a given location - the quality of Google's Street View is definitely getting better and better.

I still have to give this a try on my iPhone though, but Mike seems to think it's cool!

Quick question: I wonder if anyone has tried using Google's Street View for store-front photo view - if the coverage is good, I would love to give it a try on Center'd business profiles - any thoughts?

Vote for Center'd!

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:58:00 +0000

And you thought we are done with elections? :) Nah, there is one more reason to vote today - Center'd made it to the top 10 finalists in the Mashable Open Web awards under "Places and Events" category - and guess what - every vote counts! Please vote for Center'd today and thank you so much for your votes from the previous round!

Thanks again for your vote!

Nominate Center'd for Mashable Open Web Awards!

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:01:00 +0000

I have been so busy building cool stuff at my beloved company these days and I barely get any time to blog :D - but will fix that in coming days.

Talking about Center'd, just this morning I came across an interesting poll from Mashable re: open web awards and thought it would be cool to nominate Center'd in "Places and Events" category. Here is a blurb from Mashable regarding this poll:

Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories. This year, we’re partnering with over 100 blog partners, Poll Daddy for extra security and ease of voting and extending the nominations period and voting rounds for greater participation.

So, if you are a Center'd user and if you like what we do with the cool integration of local, social and activity planning - pl. submit your nomination for our company below.

And if you haven't been using Center'd - give it a try or if you don't like something you see on our site, let us know at feedback@centerd.com or just email me at chandu@centerd.com.

Thanks in advance for your help! :)

Where do your users come from: detecting user location on websites

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:16:00 +0000

Detecting your website user's (approximate) location has huge benefits in providing relevant experience without them telling you anything. There are a couple of techniques available today that let you do that: a) detect approximate location by IP address b) detect more accurate location using WiFi base stations (and their MAC Addresses) c) Cell tower triangulation (mobile client only) d) GPS (mobile client only). If you limit the options purely for Web Browsers and Desktops, its just IP and WiFi based location detection that's available today.

The IP Address based detection is less accurate but hassle free (your users don't need to install anything); implementing such a solution usually means that you license an IP to Geo database to look up parts of IP address to calculate a latitude/longitude value; which is fairly simple thing to do. Having said that, if you are using Google Maps for your website, detecting user's location using IP address has gotten much easier: Google maps announced that the developers can now detect user's approximate location based on their IP address at the time of loading the map. According to the documentation, the implementation looks fairly straight forward:

//Load the map.
function loadMaps() {
    google.load("maps", "2", {"callback" : mapsLoaded});
}
//Check if the client location is available. If it is set map center.
function mapsLoaded() {
    if (google.loader.ClientLocation &&
         google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude &&
         google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude)
    {
           map.setCenter(new google.maps.LatLng(google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude,
                                                             google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude), 13);
     }
}

Obviously you can implement various ways to determine the zoom level based on the city/state level info - but you get the idea. In my previous job, I have developed both IP and WiFi based location detection techniques that are being used in Virtual Earth/Live Maps today - I hope to see them open up those via APIs too.

Now the other method of detecting location based on radio stations (WiFi mostly) - this usually requires some kind of installation since browsers cannot access the radio stack by themselves and they need a handshake from some kind of a plugin to scan that information and provide it back to the browsers. Skyhook is the only commercial provider that is currently providing the tools/plug-ins to use this method today. Alternatively one can obtain a crowd-sourced database full of WiFi Hotspots and their locations and write the plugin layers on top of it. Either way the depth and recency of WiFi hotspot information determines the accuracy of the location information.

New release update on Center'd

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:14:00 +0000

We had a new release this morning on Center’d that included a set of new planning utilities as well as a number of upgrades to the existing features.

A detailed post on our official blog from Jen is up tonight. Obviously as a “local geek” and a former mapping guy, I would like to highlight the local search updates that Jen talked about:

“We also made some improvements to our local search to help you find the right places and service providers for whatever you might be looking for at this time of year (for our family, it was an orthodontist). Our search now combines aggregate ratings from across the web with the information and tags you and your friends have made on Center’d to provide even more relevant results. If you are a Center’d member, do a search and you will see higher rankings for the places you and your friends have saved. Want to make the results even better? Save and tag the places you like. I have saved everything from our pediatrician to our favorite car wash to help other people more easily find things they might like too. Give it a shot by connecting to a Center’d team member, and check out some of the places we like.”

Bringing local search into an actionable form is what we do at Center’d – in future you will see how we are going to integrate the personalized (or social) local search into planning tools in a more cohesive way. In the mean time, I would love it if you can give our planning tools and our search a try and send us feedback!

Chandu Thota

Co-Founder & CTO

http://www.centerd.com

Happy 61st Birthday, India!

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:56:00 +0000

Sixty one years of independent journey, which I'm sure is no match to thousands of years you spent in time before that, but here is to a brilliant 61 years and many more to come!

The meaning of meaninglessness

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 05:54:00 +0000

No creed or religion or system can explain the loss of innocent life. For many, including myself, this week has been one of those, that is filled with questions that never yield meaningful answers. I truly hope that the incidents in Bangalore and Ahemdabad this week represent an aberration but not a systematic flaw that is just surfacing in India.

No matter what it is, it does not make sense - hopefully it doesn't degenerate further so that we don't have to understand the meaning of this meaningless state to explain to our kids.

Photo credit goru30 @ flickr

Defining the "Experience"

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:42:00 +0000

So, I have been thinking (and working) about defining "experience" in the context of a web site or a web application, you know, like our Centerd.com and define the factors that influence it. More I think about it more deeper it gets in terms of where the experience starts and where it ends. People often think experience as the pure visual experience, while visual experience helps the over all experience, the real experience is not just what you see, but it is the whole thing. So I tried to come up with 5 factors that I think contribute to create a great experience and here is the quick summary:

1. Acceleration Factor

How fast can you get your user from 0-60? The second a user lands on your site, does he/she know what they can do, where to go and what to do and so on? What kind of words/images/anchoring techniques do you need to get them going fast? Clearly, messaging what benefit they get out of your application is the most important thing - and faster you get them to act on the primary task that they need to do better the experience is going to be.

2. Performance Factor

Okay, once the user figures out what to do on your site - then how quickly can they do it? In many cases its not an exaggeration to say that a great experience starts with a very fine tuned database query that runs very fast. So it is super critical to provide that level of performance to keep the user going at the same rate that they got started.

3. Consistency Factor

Once user does something on your site, how can they do more? So, consistency is about providing a way to parlay the experience the user had in one application context to another to move forward and do more things. So creating an environment where there is a consistent way of doing things helps greatly with the experience.

4. Reliability Factor

Reliability is about providing the same level of experience on 1, 2 and 3 over a series of visits and sessions - remember the term "it just works" or IJW? That's what it is about - how reliably you can deliver the promise that you made in the user's first visit.

5. Interface Factor

Finally, a good interface coupled with nice visuals improve the overall experience greatly - however, the real secret is in designing the interface bottom-up. Means you need to define the interface with 1, 2, 3 and 4 in mind and then build it ground up. So an interface is not an after thought - it is an integrated piece of the whole experience puzzle.

So, experience is something that one needs to consider very early on and define it as the first step - and also as you imagine great experiences are built from within (like iPhone multi-touch)!

So what do you think? Did I miss any other factors?

Meeting the expectations

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:39:00 +0000

Building a product from scratch is hard - and building it in a startup is extra hard (for all the obvious reasons you can think of); having said that one thing that I did learn from working on Virtual Earth at Microsoft and now at Center'd is that if you focus on meeting or exceeding the expectations of your users rest all is taken care of.

So how do you know if you are meeting the expectations of your users? Some times you have to 'listen' carefully (through analytics) and some times get it in your email (feedback emails) but some times though, you see the feedback publicly in blog posts, magazine articles and news letters, and we have been having our fair share of that with our "Local Planning" product that we launched a couple of weeks ago.

As Dan pointed out on our official blog we feel fortunate to have so many folks publicly talking about what we do. So thank you Erick, Erin, Michelle, Beverly and Susan, please keep the feedback coming!

Center'd in San Diego

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:00 +0000

As planned, some of us were in San Diego last weekend launching Center'd at the National PTA Conference. It was a

fantastic experience to be able to connect with parents and teachers from across the country and listen to them talk about their experiences on local planning; after all who else can understand the local planning better than parents and busy professionals? So we got tons great feedback (and some kudos!) - we are now back at our Center'd HQ and we have work cut out for us.

BTW, work is not the only thing we did while we were down in San Diego (even though we LOVE what we do) we also had a fun time at the Old Town Mexican - and yes, we discovered this wonderful restaurant using our own search tool! While we are at it, what are your favorites in San Diego? Tell us by saving them to your places on Center'd, we would like to explore them when we go back there again (and your friends will benefit from it too).

Off to San Diego

noreply@blogger.com (Chandu Thota) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:41:00 +0000

I'm off to San Diego tomorrow to attend the National PTA confernece where we will be showing newly launched product: Center'd. Local planning is a broken today and the pain particularly clear with busy adults and parents - so this is going to be a great avenue for us to get real feedback about how we can improve the experience and features.