It has been clear from day one that the Google Offers daily deals were coming to both San Francisco and New York City. We just didn’t know when. THe NYC daily offers started this AM with 3 offers, one each from NYC Downtown, NYC Midtown and NYC Uptown. The deals rolled out in NYC are all moderately priced at $10/50% off and are for food ( Belgian fries, chocolates and cupcakes). Like the more recent deals in Portland, Google is no longer making explicit how many of the deals are available.
The Offers page suggests that Offers are now also available from Oakland and San Francisco although no deals were yet to be found for those cities.
And in an apparent expansion, Offers will soon be available in Austin, Boston, Denver, DC and Seattle:
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Last week was an exciting week for me. During the Tuesday afternoon session of Getlisted Local University it became clear that big changes were going on at Google with an interface upgrade AND Google+. Jeff Huber, Google VP of Local and commerce, kept leaving juicy comments on my blog and I just didn’t want to be off the grid….
But we had scheduled some family time at a friend’s cottage at Rondeau Provincial Park in Ontario. The problem wasn’t that we had scheduled family time, my family understands and even enables my blogging addiction. It was that there was NO wifi for 20 miles although there was some sporadic cell coverage. Because I travel rarely and when I do, have access to hotel wifi, I don’t have 3g for my laptop.
My solution? An iPhone with just enough accessories that allowed me to “keep on posting”. Here are the details of my setup for those of you that want to travel lightly, aren’t willing to pony up for a Macbook Air with a Verizon card and are willing to make a few compromises.
Ingredients:
-my iPhone
-an Ultra Pod stand. cost: $24.99
-an Apple wireless keyboard. cost: $49.
-the mobile WordPress app
Total cost: $75 + tax.
The WordPress iPhone app has gotten very good, the keyboard is simple to sync and is very light and the tripod serves triple duty for me as a bike accessory, AV stand and a monitor display when blogging. You could cut costs on both the stand and the keyboard but both are durable and very functional in this configuration (and they look good too 
). The only thing holding me back from traveling exclusively this way is my need for last minute PowerPoint updates prior to presenting.
I’d be curious to hear of others who have made the switch to a smartphone instead of a laptop as travel device.
I very rarely drive to places unknown and thus am in little need of turn by turn navigation. Certainly not enough to buy a dedicated GPS device and not enough to warrant investing $99 in the iPhone TomTom app.
But it turned out that it was best for me to drive to Getlisted Local U in Grand Rapids this past week and since I was traveling solo I decided to use Mapquest 4′s iPhone app with turn by turn capability. I had 3 legs to the trip; Olean to a near in Detroit suburb, Detroit to Grand Rapids and Grand Rapids to Rondeau Provincial Park in Canada. With but one glitch, I can report that the performance of the product was superb… it reliably alerted me of upcoming turns, had very accurate maps and even went into a reduced volume mode when I was talking on the phone so that I could hear its instructions in the background
I can’t speak to its global use or even its value in far away places where road data is likely to be less accurate but as a general purpose tool it performed very well almost all of the time.
The one exception was when attempting to get onto the bridge to Canada in Detroit…. the entrance was under construction and between the GPS and the detour signs I was caught in an endless loop across the highway several times and not finding the entrance. When I finally saw a state road sign that read:
Follow the detour signs NOT your GPS (idiot was implied) I realized that Mapquest was not the only GPS experiencing the problem. The mass of cars of which I was but one, seemed to be guided by the same bad instructions, and all successfully made it onto the bridge and into Canada.
As smart phone penetration has reached such high levels and the quality of free turn by turn products hits “good enough” levels, the role of the low end dedicated GPS devices will continue to decline.
The market is reflecting this reality. TomTom bought TeleAtlas for $8 billion several years ago. The combined company is now worth a fraction of that and things don’t look rosy for them going forward. Certainly a $99 app isn’t going to save them.
With Google going their own way on map data in the US and Bing partnering so closely with Nokia, the opportunities for TomTom/TeleAtlas seemed to be dramatically diminished in the low end. Its not clear who would want to buy the combo either.
Ah well life in local is tough.
Kudos to Mapquest for a mobile product well done.
Jeff Huber, Google VP of Local and Commerce, has indicated that Google+, at some point in the near future will include the option for business profile page. Here is his comment:
And pre-emptively answering a question — yes, we will have (smb) business profile pages on Google+. I can’t announce a launch date yet, but we want to make them *great*, and we’re coding as fast as we can.
He has additionally indicated that he will be using Google+ as his primary voice (not Twitter) and that, if we let him know, he will make invites available for the Google+ field trial to anyone that needs one.
I am not sure what I think about the idea of having a second SMB profile in addition to an already claimed Places page (it is early, I am on vacation and typing on a bad cell signal on my iPhone but wanted to get this out).
Obviously a large number of small businesses have yet to figure out Places and the idea of a second “Places” is somewhat daunting unless it is well integrated into the existing processes. In the end, I suppose that it comes down to the benefits that an SMB would derive as to whether it will be worth it. It is certainly an interesting idea.
If nothing else, Jeff putting up with my tweaks and providing this information, demonstrates the possibility of a coming transparency from the folks at Google Local (hooray!!).
