Viking

(cross-posted from the goby blog)

If you’ve read any of the background on goby, you probably know we started the company after I missed seeing Jack Johnson play a gig in Hawaii. In the spirit of trying to help you not miss great shows, we’ve decided to start a tradition of a Thursday morning post letting you know about some of the great gigs going on every weekend (we’re starting in Boston). Without further commercial interruption, here’s some of our favorite bets for this weekend:

If you’re into old school, Blood, Sweat and Tears are playing at the Berklee Performance center.

A little closer to the current century, if you want some indie goodness, check out Deerhunter at the Royale.

Home town folkie girl Lori McKenna is at the Natick Center for the Arts.

Perennial classic acoustic jazz team Acoustic Alchemy is at the Scullers Jazz club.

Finally, Yoko Miwa Trio is playing some great jazz at goby’s home base restaurant, Les Zygomates.

Details of all of these can be found on my weekend music list.

And of course, to see all the Boston concerts this weekend, hit up this link.

As some of you may have heard, one of the inspirations for Goby was me missing Jack Johnson playing a concert on Oahu one time when I was there. The lack of a single place to go to find out “what’s going on” is one of the reasons why people miss great events, and missing Jack Johnson playing in his native Hawaii would have been so cool! (Aside: we feel a special bond because my wife is part Hawaiian and her aunt actually taught at Jack’s high school).

So, it was great to finally close the loop and see Jack play this weekend (albeit at the Comcast center in Marshfield, MA, not in Hawaii). It was a great show – he played pretty much all his well-known tunes (“Taylor”, “Flake” , “Breakdown”) plus a bunch of songs from his new album To The Sea. Some bands are rough when they perform live, and some bands are so tight they sound like their recordings. Jack, for all his loose-and-free Hawaii surfer-dude attitude, is tight. His live performances are almost indistinguishable from his recordings.

G-Love opened for him, and was strong in both the warm-up set as well as when he returned for a few songs with Jack later in the evening.

The 60s were in full swing as the crowd took full advantage of the recent Massachusetts law making marijuana a civil violation; tie-dye, tiaras and headbands, biblical beards and other vestiges of the 60s seemed to be everywhere – you would have thought you were at a Led Zeppelin concert. The social element of the 60s was also visible in the form of Carbon Offsets being sold by the tour to cover the tour’s carbon footprint. Jack’s admirable work starting up his own social action network was in evidence in the booths at the concert for the All At Once (allatonce.org) Foundation. But the real atmosphere was the spirit of Aloha and friendliness of the crowd as well as the performers (including other Hawaiian musicians like Paula Fuga who joined Jack on stage). A little bit of Hawaii in Massachusetts!

Wow. Things are really getting interesting. I’ve been talking for a while now about the convergence of search & travel, search & local, search & mobile/location based services. This is just another proof point (a $700M proof point). It doesn’t really affect Goby directly – we really haven’t been playing in the airfare space, we decided a long time ago to leave that to people who already do it well. The biggest potential losers in this deal are the metasearch players and online travel agencies – Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, because Google can now build a user experience for flight search that dis-intermediates those companies and connects users directly to airlines for purchasing.

There’s also an interesting tension with many travel advertisers – Google receives billions of dollars in travel advertising revenue, but increasingly travel companies are viewing Google as competition (through things like Google Places pages and Google City Tours), and might take their ad $ elsewhere. The other interesting potential loser is Microsoft, for two reasons. First, Bing Travel is a great differentiator for Bing, and now Google has said they will build a competitor, where previously they had none. Second, Bing Travel (an enhanced and re-branded version of Farecast), was powered by ITA – it will be interesting to see how long that lasts!

Interesting times indeed. As airfares become more and more of a pure commodity, at Goby we’re thinking the action in the industry will turn to finding experiences – the real reason people travel. And Goby is perfectly positioned for that.

(btw – in addition to the obvious, Google is a winner in that they get a huge pool of deep engineering talent, and vertical expertise in the travel industry. They also pick up an interesting and not well publicized asset of ITA, the Needle project).

Had a great (and very informative!) visit with Robert Scoble, his coverage is here. He said some great things about us (“more important than foursquare”!), but one of the most rewarding things was that his wife loves Goby as well. It’s one thing to impress someone technical with what you’ve achieved – it’s even more rewarding when people who aren’t in it for the technology see the usefulness of something in their daily life.

Here’s the interview:

There’s a convergence coming, between the worlds of search, travel, local, and social. It used to be that if you were traveling, you used a guidebook and map and talked to the concierge, then you graduated to TripAdvisor and Expedia (and if you were adventurous, Kayak). People’s use of search engines tended not to intersect with their travel planning. In recent years of course Google has become a de facto part of the travel planning experience – although by no means a perfect one. And some search engines have introduced travel products (notably Bing Travel). And for planning your weekend, search engines have historically not been of much use at all – they don’t understand the concept of time or location very well (“this weekend” is just a few keywords to them), and don’t understand your task (when I search for beaches on Cape Cod, why do I get back results for restaurants with the word “beach” in them?). Robert Scoble has some thoughts on this subject, here. Google appears to be moving in this direction, with their rumored acquisition of ITA, which powers many airfare metasearch sites including Kayak. Their abortive attempt to acquire Yelp shows how search & local are converging as well.

But there’s a new game in town – social/local gaming, in particular with things like Foursquare and Gowalla, that combine social gaming with local-search-like results, allowing people to broadcast where they are and what they’re doing. There’s an evolving “stack” of technologies, including location databases and engagement tools, nicely summarized by Chris Dixon. (I disagree with his assertion that location databases will become commoditized – the information is too hard to come by, and companies like InfoUSA make hundreds of millions in revenue providing this kind of data. Not to mention the startups like SimpleGeo and Locationary and for that matter Goby, that are tackling the problem, but I digress).

This kind of engagement is going to have a profound impact on how people plan travel and figure out their weekends. DeepDish Creative (http://deepdishcreative.com/wordpress/2010/02/foursquare-for-tourism/) is talking about how destination marketing organizations can leverage these tools to promote their destination. But I see two problems with this generation of tools as they apply to this problem:

1. They are after-the-fact. I tend to engage with Foursquare after I’m already AT someplace – Foursquare isn’t really involved in my decision process, it simply records what I’ve already decided. As a result, it has limited use (not no use, just limited use) in making decisions.
2. These tools only recognize a limited set of entities, primarily businesses (in fact, primarily restaurants). It’s hard to check in at a U2 concert, because it’s an event, and it’s hard to check in at the Grand Canyon, because it’s not really an entity, it’s a generalized (and off-the-beaten-track) place. God help you if you want to check-in on a hiking trail!

Addressing those last two elements would create a resource that will not only appeal to my vanity & let me broadcast what I’m doing, but more importantly help me decide.

The key need here is a semantically meaningful database of things, to key all your features off of, and search tool to find & organize them – not just a pile of URLs. The system needs to know that Yo La Tengo is a band playing at the Fillmore on the 23rd of April, with a date and a location – not just a pile of keywords without any meaning. Any system like this needs to cover hotels and restaurants as well as non-business entities like hiking trails or concerts, and once you leave hotels/restaurants, this information is hard to come by. Once you have the database of entities, it is straightforward to build a platform for people to engage with their networks, in the context of that content. Once you have a strongly categorized, rich database of things to do, and a strong network of people telling you what they are interested in, you can provide compelling recommendations as well as support discovery. And, strangely enough 8), that’s where we’re headed with Goby – we plan to be right at the intersection of this convergence.

Recorded today in NY for Shelly Palmer’s Digital Life, an NBC show in NY focused on consumer tech. My first time doing TV. Makeup & the whole bit. First observation: These people work early! The makeup person told me she started work around 3:30am. ick. Good news for her: home by 10:30am.

Recording was fun. 3 minutes (my segment) goes by SO fast when the lights go on. You’ve got to have your message down to so few words to get it in there crisply. Watching Shelly was fun – so matter of factly creates so many facial expressions, rarely makes any mistakes. When he looks at you on camera, it’s with such focus that I had a hard time not feeling like a deer in the headlights…

They had these cool robotic cameras (for some reason my picture didn’t come out), but one of the other guests was telling me that those cameras replace 3 or 4 cameramen, driving costs way down. They seem very similar to the robots that are in many factories and warehouses these days.

Came down the night before and caught Los Campesinos, a welsh punk band at the Fillmore. Those guys rock. Was going to mention it on the show, but NBC doesn’t really seem like a “welsh punk” kind of show

What’s Goby all about anyway? On the surface, Goby is a search engine for things to do in your free time. The travel industry has invested hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in helping you get a hotel room and plane ticket – but hotels and plane rides aren’t why people travel – they travel for experiences. Finding experiences is tough – the information is scattered around the web, locked away in domain-specific databases, and often with poor user experiences and bad information architecture. And we’ve all had the experience of sitting around on a Friday night trying to decide what to do over the weekend – essentially the same problem. Goby crawls the web looking for high quality sources of information about all kinds of experiences, covering both traditional travel content (tours, attractions, lodging) as well as more local-oriented things to do (like music, theater, restaurants, museums, hiking trails, surfing spots and skiing…). We then take those results and contextualize them, by geolocating the results and putting them on a map, cross-referencing photography from around the web, and converting those web pages we found into real-world objects you can make decisions about.

Under the covers, Goby is a structured data, task-centric search engine. Over the years there has been continuous interest in the tech & business communities around “what is the next Google?”. In my view there won’t be a “next Google” in search, if by that one means a market-dominating, universally applicable search engine. The future of search is task-centric information access, that supports both findability and exploration in the context of specific objectives – say, finding a new book to read, deciding what neighborhood to move to, getting your next job or deciding where to eat. The shortcoming of major search engines is that, while they can happily parse your query and give you some web pages to read, they have no idea what you are trying to accomplish – and therefore cannot adapt their experience to support your task. You can see this trend happening with Goby (search engine for your free time), and with other interesting products like Milo (product search will real-time store inventory), and the very interesting Hunch ( a general purpose recommendation/decision engine).

The other major dimension to how people consume information is through social media – tools that integrate search & social media have the opportunity to bring the engagement of social media to the findability of search. Look for more on this from Goby in the future.

Welcome to the new and improved viking blog. I started this blog back in the day as an experiment in home-rolled lifestreaming, covering some of the passions in my life – travel, books, and music. I wanted a way to integrate my activities in some of the social media sites I was engaged with (Last.FM, LibraryThing, Flickr) with longer-form blogging. When I co-founded Goby, a lot of that went out the window as we got the company off the ground. I’m now at a place where I can restart things. I’ll continue to cover the books/music/travel areas that I’m passionate about, but want to bring in some new areas I’m really engaged in. In particular, information is the ocean we all swim in, and I want to explore the world of search, social media, and information retrieval, and how people consume information, especially as it relates to their free time, and of course, our experiences building Goby.

Currently I’m focused on Goby, a search engine for finding things to do in your free time, co-founded with Mike Stonebraker, Andy Palmer, Vince Russo and Mujde Pamuk, so not much posting going on here.