Business Videos: an update to our launch

A couple of weeks ago, we launched a way for business owners and consumers to upload videos associated with a business.

In that short period of time, we've seen all kinds of videos uploaded. YellowBot users uploaded infomercials, commercials, testimonials, appeals to consumers, slide shows, creatives, on-location videos such as guitar players at bars & performances at the county fair, demostrations, and videos of how they build a 2 pound sandwich as big as your head...One merchant even uploaded a video of dancing and singing cats to sell tickets! :-)

We're glad to see YellowBot users have enjoyed using this feature, providing merchants another way to reach out to consumers and consumers to either communicate with other potential consumers or with the merchants. Adoption has been much better than what we have imagined and, as always, your feedback is appreciated.

You can upload your videos the same way you upload a picture on YellowBot: you search for the business you are looking for, go to its page, then click on the "upload video" link.

Your videos will also show up on our iPhone site.

What's With Those Crazy Ratings Graphs?

YellowBot has been showing visual ratings information like the one below for some time now.



Fitz started a blog post about our site and we started having a two-way communication about features on the site...in particular, those visual ratings.

In the post, we describe how they are useful:

We don’t plan on adding any additional info at the moment. Here is another example and a description of how the info is used:
http://www.yellowbot.com/ezo-dinning-sushi-bar-west-hollywood-ca.html
The location above has an overall rating of 3 out of 5 stars
The distribution summary (red/green/yellow/etc bar at the bottom of that section) shows the ratings all over the place so it is not 3 stars because people voted at either extreme or because there was a consensus that it was 3 stars).
Take a look at the line graph demonstrating the ratings over time and you see that people rated it highly but the restaurant, according to users, has gone downhill. It’s rated a 3 because it was rated highly but, as time went on, people liked it less and less for one reason or another (you can read the reviews to find out specifics).

The "specifics" referred to is a YellowBot review that explains that there was a management change.

Not only is this useful to our users but business owners can manage their reputations as well.

In this particular case, we hear EZO Sushi has now closed (but have not been able to confirm this because nobody is answering their phone)...it just highlights the importance of listening to your customers.

LA Tech Community Growing

Many of you in the Los Angeles area are aware that the YellowBot team frequents many of the tech events in this area such as Lunch 2.0 (courtesy of Andrew Warner and Mixergy) and Twiistup (courtesy of Mike Macadaan). We're happy to be part of this community and look forward to doing more to support it.

So, we were glad to see Matt Marshall of VentureBeat reporting on the growth of VC investments and that LA was in the top 3.

The fastest growing major centers of U.S. venture capital investment are Seattle, Los Angeles, and the Washington DC metro area, all quietly growing their venture base over the last ten years, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

Thos of you interested in meeting us in person in the LA area, you'll be able to find us at most Lunch 2.0 or Twiistup events. We are also going to be at the TechCrunch/PopSugar event being held at The Vanguard on April 10 and MashMeet LA being held at SEVEN on March 29. See you there!

Fire Eagle Launches

Yahoo's Fire Eagle was launched today at O'Reilly's ETech conference (finally).

Users can go there and share their current location or use one of the applications that uses Fire Eagle to update their location as well.

Application developers can set or get a user's location. Local search sites such as YellowBot will be able to access this info and share it with other applications that utilize Fire Eagle to create a better user experience. Users must authorize applications to be able to access this info (for those of you concerned about how this feature works).

Users go to the Fire Eagle site to update their info (coming soon are other ways to update including SMS, Nokia ZoneTags, a mobile version of the site, and a Facebook app). Users will also manage access to their information on the Fire Eagle site.

What does this mean for local sites? At the very least, they make utilizing their sites easier by pre-populating the geography for a user. Most sites have both a location and a search term for finding businesses. Many UI people will be glad if they can simplify utilizing their sites by eliminating one of these form elements. Mobile sites will be able to provide accurate results about all sorts of information...how close your friends are, which restaurants around you are rated the best or have a special deal, etc.

The biggest hurdle, however, will be adoption of Fire Eagle. How many people will actually sign up and update it? That may really depend on which tools ultimately decide to utilize it. Twitter? Facebook? MySpace? All of them? Maybe a combination of smaller sites not concerned about utilizing a Yahoo service since they don't directly compete with them. What will it take? This application has plenty of potential but I'd like to see some wide adoption.

Their application gallery says:

There are many apps under development at the moment and they will be released soon, so please check back here often to great sites and apps from our worldwide developer community...

I will definitely be checking back and we at YellowBot will be evaluating the possibilities as well!

Lunch 2.0 at YellowBot!

Lunch 2.0 is coming to YellowBot!

If you are in the Los Angeles area on October 12th, please come by. RSVP here.

Updating business information on YellowBot

Woah - you guys keep us busy!

One of the things we're doing behind the scenes here at YellowBot HQ is making the computers smarter and better at giving you the most up-to-date and correct information.

Of course often business information changes faster than it gets to us, so we have a process for getting data updated on the site (look for the "submit a correction" link at the bottom of each business details page). And oh boy, have you used it!

Lately we've been hard at work updating and improving our backend systems for reviewing and processing these corrections (it's a lot trickier than you'd think). We're building snazzy and easy to use Javascript/Ajax interfaces so we can catch up on all the corrections. But until it's done we're working through them at a snails pace... Hopefully late this week or early next week we'll be processing at full speed again. Until then, please stay patient!

We are also going to add a tool so you can see what changes you've submitted and what the status of each submission is.

If you have questions about a specific listing, you can email us at support at yellowbot dot com. Be sure to include your phone number or the URL for your listing on our site so we can find it.

Technorati Profile

Woah - it's been a while, once again.

We've made tons and tons of little changes to the site. A few of them are really cool - for example we added a little graph showing user ratings over time. A typical type of business where that is fun is the new Hot Super Popular Club that gets rave reviews for a few months and then worse and worse reviews (until it closes). :-)

Another widget we added is showing the relative ratio of bad reviews vs good reviews - answering questions like "is this place just average (boring!) or are people passionately both loving and hating it".

You can see them both on for example,

    http://www.yellowbot.com/the-ivy-los-angeles-ca.html

Many of the changes we've done are roll-your-eyes boring, but such is the world of incremental development. :-)

One of the roll-your-eyes-boring changes is adding advertisement on a few of the pages to a fraction of the users (chosen at random). If you hate ads and you are getting them, then you can turn the "ads experiment" off by going to

     http://www.yellowbot.com/?set_exp=ads:0

(But don't tell our accountant that we told you that. ;-) )

Oh - we also added driving directions. A much requested feature. Just click on the "map" tab on a business listing. As you might have seen on the bugs forum there's still some issue with printing them in some browsers - we'll get to the bottom of that soon.

In the last month and a half we've also been answering hundreds of emails from you guys and I can confidently say that yes, a better support system is being implemented so we can help you better!

Thanks again for trying out our site!

Update: Some users asked if they could see how the site works with the ads - so I wrote up instructions on how to do that too.

Infrastructure build-out

The last weeks have seen lots of infrastructure improvements. We've been preparing our software for new features and tweaking the servers it's all running on.

A lot of the work is, well, pretty boring and frustrating because it doesn't directly bring new features to the site. But it has to be done, and for our small team we've built a pretty awesome system.

(the rest of this post gets a little technical, so skip back to YellowBot if you aren't interested. :-) )

For example one of the changes we did recently was to setup our main database server with a redundant fail-over system. Most of the time this is, well, a waste! (We do use it for some of the "background" data processing too). But when we have to do work on the server or when something goes wrong with the primary server it's invaluable.

A few of our servers, including the database server is missing an IPMI card. The IPMI cards make remote management of the servers a breeze and saves us trips downtown when things go wrong.

We got a list together of the boxes missing this handy enhancement and got the cards ordered this week, yay! They should show up next week, but to install them we have to shutdown the server!

That's when the extra database server comes in handy. We can quietly switch them in the background and then bring down the primary server for maintenance. When we are done, we switch back and work on the backup server - and if we don't screw anything up you, the user, won't notice anything on the site!

While I am hopelessly technical already, I'll have to recommend a couple of our favorite related tools.

First there's Puppet, a configuration management tool we use to keep the configuration on each server sane. Between Kickstart and Puppet we can get a new server ready to serve traffic in 10-15 minutes after it's plugged in to power and the network.

After the servers are running, we have to monitor how they are doing (if nothing else then to know when it's time to order more!). For that we primarily use Munin. Munin is a Raven in the Nordic Mythology that travels the world to bring news and information to Odin.

I posted an example of the graphs it can make a few weeks ago.

Early YellowBot Press Clippings

Solfo's new website YellowBot has been live for just over a month now. We'd like to share some of the early responses with you:

• SEOPittfall - Interview with Erron Silverstein
• Mike Boland's posting on The Kelsey Group's blog about YellowBot
• StartUpBEAT's Interview with Erron Silverstein
• Brian Wool's blog posting on Clickz about the new paradigms of local search
• Dick Larkin's blog posting on YP Commando
• Greg Sterling's blog posting on Screenwerk
• Donna Bogatin's blog posting on ZDnet

The fun with early growth rates

One of the fun things about just starting out is the dramatic growth rates. It doesn't yet take that much for us to double our traffic overnight, but it's still fun when it happens!

The weekend was pretty slow for our servers, but it's just mid-day now and we've already had more visitors than our busiest day last week. Yay! Of course it just makes it even more obvious how much work we have to do ...

Where does the traffic come from? A couple of percent of you have our site bookmarked or enter the address directly into the address bar (or from an email?). Practically everyone else comes from Google or another search engine (like AOL search) using the Google search results.