Back in August, we got word that a startup called PlaceBook was being bullied by Facebook into changing their name. Obviously, a lot of companies are trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook now given the social network’s massive success, but in the case of PlaceBook, their name really just perfectly describes their service — more on that in a second. Still, Facebook lawyered up and PlaceBook founder Michael Rubin had to make a decision: fight or survive. He chose the latter.
PlaceBook is now known as TripTrace. Still in private beta, it’s a service that allows you to note places around the world you’ve been to. And places you’d like to go to in the future. All of this is done in two books (dare I call them “Place Books”?): your Atlas (places you’ve been), and your Travel (places you want to go). There’s a heavy emphasis on maps in these books, and all of your places are marked by pins (red for where you’ve been, blue for where you’re going).
The key to TripTrace is that it makes the complicated notion of travel planning relatively simple. They do this both by making the process a more visual experience, and with a series of tools. One of those is a TripClipper bookmarklet. With it, you can easily take notes as you’re browsing around the web, to bookmark things you find that you might like to do on a trip. Maybe you’re reading an article on a good restaurant in Paris, for example. With the bookmarklet, you can highlight what you want to save and it will be stored in your TripTrace books.
You can also email in things to add to your books. And eventually, of course, the plan is to add mobile applications to the arsenal as well so you can tag and note things on the go.
When you go back to the site, you’ll see the data you’ve saved as well as a ton of other data that TripTrace pulls from around the web via APIs. You know the drill here: Flickr pictures, Foursquare places, all types of events — eventually, anything that is location tagged, Rubin says. All of this data provides a rich place experience within TripTrace itself and will hopefully help you make decisions on places you want to go next.
In the Travel book, you can use any of the things you’ve clipped to help you get a costimate for a trip to that particular city. While this obviously isn’t exact, something like this is very helpful when determining if a trip is even feasible in the first place. TripTrace pulls information on things like flights and hotels based on your current location and dates you want to travel.
It should be fairly obvious by now that the eventual business model for TripTrace will be lead generation. If the service can team up with the Kayaks of the world, they can probably make for a pretty nice customer experience, while getting paid. Partnerships in the travel space is what Rubin and his team will go after. And they have some other ideas for possible sources of revenue as well — perhaps actual place books?
But that’s down the road. First, they need to nail the user experience. “The Holy Grail isn’t just getting stuff on a map, it’s mixing personal and private with public and common data,” Rubin says. “If you put that in one place, it’s enormously powerful,” he continues. But again, he notes that it need to be in a format and experience that’s useful.
Rubin and his team have quite a bit knowledge about merging public data with more personalized data, as many of them are ex-Netflix guys. Rubin himself was a director of product management there and was instrumental in the development of the website.
TripTrace currently has data for about 20,000 cities, and they’re pulling in more data each day. The service is officially an offshoot from PublicEarth, a free wiki database for locations, which has raised some money in the past. But Rubin notes this is a whole new team working on TripTrace, and they hope to be ready for a public launch sometime in the next few weeks. Provided they don’t change their name back to PlaceBook and get sued out of existence by Facebook first, of course.
Juan Williams' firing sends a wake-up call just in time for the mid-term elections. Voters should demand to know if candidates will continue funding NPR. It's time to stop putting government funding into programs that compete with the private sector. Tax dollars, after all, should be used to fund initiatives that take care of the needy or provide services that the private sector can't or isn't willing to provide. Information radio in the United States is hardly something that our government should think is a top priority, especially when we have budget deficits, sky-rocketing unemployment, falling government revenue and critical public programs being cut. There is also a healthy and vibrant private sector news radio industry and, therefore, no need to prop up one funded with tax dollars. Government money given to NPR means government sponsored radio competing with the private sector - a uniquely un-American idea. If private sector citizens want to fund NPR then they should step up and do it with more commitment. Coercing the rest of us to pay for NPR's elite radio programming through our taxes is clearly a subsidy for the wealthy.
NPR and its executives are to blame for the reaction to this alarm bell going off. NPR's intolerance of conservative opinions is well-known. There are very few voices allowed on NPR programs that represent opinions outside the traditional liberal and elite viewpoints. When NPR does allow a conservative voice air-time, it is limited and usually preceded by a condescending question or commentary. Juan Williams firing by NPR was only a matter of time because the liberal executives running the shows at NPR never liked the fact that Williams was on Fox News. It's clear that NPR would rather play consistently to the left than reach a balanced audience. And for that, they deserve to be pushed away from the public trough.
As all conservatives already know, NPR consistently frames stories in a slanted way to aid and comfort its overwhelming left listenership. For instance, the current rising unemployment rate is not portrayed as an Obama Administration problem. It is usually reported by NPR without an Obama angle and more times than not, as a total spin job. Conversely, every month the unemployment rate went up during the Bush Administration it was portrayed as an announcement from the Bush White House or Bush Team followed by an evaluation of Bush's economic policies. The NPR diatribe was clear: unemployment is rising and Bush's policies are not working.
This past Labor Day, the traditional start of election season, NPR reported the rising 9.6 unemployment rate as a recovery in the making. And I'm not joking. Shockingly, commentators and story selections were spinning that a recovery was happening, just slowly. NPR even highlighted a story suggesting that more people were traveling for Labor Day and feeling good about the economy. But in fact, a recovery wasn't happening and the unemployment rate has risen.
Conservatives have seethed for years as NPR hosts mock conservative ideas, poke fun at conservative candidates' mistakes and run stories over several days when there is a negative story to tell about a Republican. Every conservative scandal receives multiple days of commentary and a thorough analysis, while Democrats caught in mishaps either get little coverage, no mentions at all or one hit.
My local NPR station in Los Angeles just yesterday ran a LIVE extended interview with one of the most liberal members of the County Board of Supervisors (15 days before the mid-term elections) where he lauded Senator Barbara Boxer's leadership on public transportation issues. He praised Boxer for something she hasn't even taken credit for. He went on to give additional credit to only Democrats for bringing a new rail line to the people of LA. The host of the interview never pushed back or asked a question of the Supervisor's claim that Boxer brought the rail line to LA - it was just assumed that Boxer delivered to the people. Boxer's new rail line, by the way, doesn't even extend to the airport - which happens to be the number one transportation concern for residents - so if she did bring this project to LA it's a colossal waste of tax dollars. Sadly, it was an expected and typical interview from NPR.
But thanks to Juan Williams being fired, the rest of us might be able to keep a little more money in our paychecks. Voters everywhere should ask their congressional candidates to commit to stop publicly funding NPR before they cast their ballots on November 2. My mom used to take the ball away from us when someone cheated. She would say, "If you can't play fair then you can't play at all". It's time voters took the ball away from NPR.
Nielsen: 362000 Monthly Users For <b>News</b> Corp.'s Times Paywall <b>...</b>
News International's silence on subscriber numbers for Times and Sunday Times online content continues, three and a half months after the paywall went up. But today audience research company Nielsen has taken a stab at estimating the ...
Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>
LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo
It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.
bench craft company complaints
bench craft company complaints
Nielsen: 362000 Monthly Users For <b>News</b> Corp.'s Times Paywall <b>...</b>
News International's silence on subscriber numbers for Times and Sunday Times online content continues, three and a half months after the paywall went up. But today audience research company Nielsen has taken a stab at estimating the ...
Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>
LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo
It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Back in August, we got word that a startup called PlaceBook was being bullied by Facebook into changing their name. Obviously, a lot of companies are trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook now given the social network’s massive success, but in the case of PlaceBook, their name really just perfectly describes their service — more on that in a second. Still, Facebook lawyered up and PlaceBook founder Michael Rubin had to make a decision: fight or survive. He chose the latter.
PlaceBook is now known as TripTrace. Still in private beta, it’s a service that allows you to note places around the world you’ve been to. And places you’d like to go to in the future. All of this is done in two books (dare I call them “Place Books”?): your Atlas (places you’ve been), and your Travel (places you want to go). There’s a heavy emphasis on maps in these books, and all of your places are marked by pins (red for where you’ve been, blue for where you’re going).
The key to TripTrace is that it makes the complicated notion of travel planning relatively simple. They do this both by making the process a more visual experience, and with a series of tools. One of those is a TripClipper bookmarklet. With it, you can easily take notes as you’re browsing around the web, to bookmark things you find that you might like to do on a trip. Maybe you’re reading an article on a good restaurant in Paris, for example. With the bookmarklet, you can highlight what you want to save and it will be stored in your TripTrace books.
You can also email in things to add to your books. And eventually, of course, the plan is to add mobile applications to the arsenal as well so you can tag and note things on the go.
When you go back to the site, you’ll see the data you’ve saved as well as a ton of other data that TripTrace pulls from around the web via APIs. You know the drill here: Flickr pictures, Foursquare places, all types of events — eventually, anything that is location tagged, Rubin says. All of this data provides a rich place experience within TripTrace itself and will hopefully help you make decisions on places you want to go next.
In the Travel book, you can use any of the things you’ve clipped to help you get a costimate for a trip to that particular city. While this obviously isn’t exact, something like this is very helpful when determining if a trip is even feasible in the first place. TripTrace pulls information on things like flights and hotels based on your current location and dates you want to travel.
It should be fairly obvious by now that the eventual business model for TripTrace will be lead generation. If the service can team up with the Kayaks of the world, they can probably make for a pretty nice customer experience, while getting paid. Partnerships in the travel space is what Rubin and his team will go after. And they have some other ideas for possible sources of revenue as well — perhaps actual place books?
But that’s down the road. First, they need to nail the user experience. “The Holy Grail isn’t just getting stuff on a map, it’s mixing personal and private with public and common data,” Rubin says. “If you put that in one place, it’s enormously powerful,” he continues. But again, he notes that it need to be in a format and experience that’s useful.
Rubin and his team have quite a bit knowledge about merging public data with more personalized data, as many of them are ex-Netflix guys. Rubin himself was a director of product management there and was instrumental in the development of the website.
TripTrace currently has data for about 20,000 cities, and they’re pulling in more data each day. The service is officially an offshoot from PublicEarth, a free wiki database for locations, which has raised some money in the past. But Rubin notes this is a whole new team working on TripTrace, and they hope to be ready for a public launch sometime in the next few weeks. Provided they don’t change their name back to PlaceBook and get sued out of existence by Facebook first, of course.
Juan Williams' firing sends a wake-up call just in time for the mid-term elections. Voters should demand to know if candidates will continue funding NPR. It's time to stop putting government funding into programs that compete with the private sector. Tax dollars, after all, should be used to fund initiatives that take care of the needy or provide services that the private sector can't or isn't willing to provide. Information radio in the United States is hardly something that our government should think is a top priority, especially when we have budget deficits, sky-rocketing unemployment, falling government revenue and critical public programs being cut. There is also a healthy and vibrant private sector news radio industry and, therefore, no need to prop up one funded with tax dollars. Government money given to NPR means government sponsored radio competing with the private sector - a uniquely un-American idea. If private sector citizens want to fund NPR then they should step up and do it with more commitment. Coercing the rest of us to pay for NPR's elite radio programming through our taxes is clearly a subsidy for the wealthy.
NPR and its executives are to blame for the reaction to this alarm bell going off. NPR's intolerance of conservative opinions is well-known. There are very few voices allowed on NPR programs that represent opinions outside the traditional liberal and elite viewpoints. When NPR does allow a conservative voice air-time, it is limited and usually preceded by a condescending question or commentary. Juan Williams firing by NPR was only a matter of time because the liberal executives running the shows at NPR never liked the fact that Williams was on Fox News. It's clear that NPR would rather play consistently to the left than reach a balanced audience. And for that, they deserve to be pushed away from the public trough.
As all conservatives already know, NPR consistently frames stories in a slanted way to aid and comfort its overwhelming left listenership. For instance, the current rising unemployment rate is not portrayed as an Obama Administration problem. It is usually reported by NPR without an Obama angle and more times than not, as a total spin job. Conversely, every month the unemployment rate went up during the Bush Administration it was portrayed as an announcement from the Bush White House or Bush Team followed by an evaluation of Bush's economic policies. The NPR diatribe was clear: unemployment is rising and Bush's policies are not working.
This past Labor Day, the traditional start of election season, NPR reported the rising 9.6 unemployment rate as a recovery in the making. And I'm not joking. Shockingly, commentators and story selections were spinning that a recovery was happening, just slowly. NPR even highlighted a story suggesting that more people were traveling for Labor Day and feeling good about the economy. But in fact, a recovery wasn't happening and the unemployment rate has risen.
Conservatives have seethed for years as NPR hosts mock conservative ideas, poke fun at conservative candidates' mistakes and run stories over several days when there is a negative story to tell about a Republican. Every conservative scandal receives multiple days of commentary and a thorough analysis, while Democrats caught in mishaps either get little coverage, no mentions at all or one hit.
My local NPR station in Los Angeles just yesterday ran a LIVE extended interview with one of the most liberal members of the County Board of Supervisors (15 days before the mid-term elections) where he lauded Senator Barbara Boxer's leadership on public transportation issues. He praised Boxer for something she hasn't even taken credit for. He went on to give additional credit to only Democrats for bringing a new rail line to the people of LA. The host of the interview never pushed back or asked a question of the Supervisor's claim that Boxer brought the rail line to LA - it was just assumed that Boxer delivered to the people. Boxer's new rail line, by the way, doesn't even extend to the airport - which happens to be the number one transportation concern for residents - so if she did bring this project to LA it's a colossal waste of tax dollars. Sadly, it was an expected and typical interview from NPR.
But thanks to Juan Williams being fired, the rest of us might be able to keep a little more money in our paychecks. Voters everywhere should ask their congressional candidates to commit to stop publicly funding NPR before they cast their ballots on November 2. My mom used to take the ball away from us when someone cheated. She would say, "If you can't play fair then you can't play at all". It's time voters took the ball away from NPR.
bench craft company complaints
Nielsen: 362000 Monthly Users For <b>News</b> Corp.'s Times Paywall <b>...</b>
News International's silence on subscriber numbers for Times and Sunday Times online content continues, three and a half months after the paywall went up. But today audience research company Nielsen has taken a stab at estimating the ...
Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>
LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo
It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Nielsen: 362000 Monthly Users For <b>News</b> Corp.'s Times Paywall <b>...</b>
News International's silence on subscriber numbers for Times and Sunday Times online content continues, three and a half months after the paywall went up. But today audience research company Nielsen has taken a stab at estimating the ...
Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>
LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo
It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Nielsen: 362000 Monthly Users For <b>News</b> Corp.'s Times Paywall <b>...</b>
News International's silence on subscriber numbers for Times and Sunday Times online content continues, three and a half months after the paywall went up. But today audience research company Nielsen has taken a stab at estimating the ...
Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>
LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo
It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
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