Two Percent Nation

Mapping Mister Softee in NYC

I've been playing with Google's My Maps service since it launched last year.  Mostly I've used it for personal maps such as travel itineraries or things like that.  I recently decided I wanted to create a public map to share in Google's directory and see whether I could get others to collaborate.  The arrival of summer in New York City has brought with it the familiar Mister Softee ice cream trucks.  So I've created a Mister Softee NYC map and started it with two of the locations I know of (in Manhattan trucks usually park at the same intersections).  Now I'm hoping to rally the soft-serve loving residents of New York to help me complete the map. If you want to contribute click the View Larger Map link below.

View Larger Map

Effective Outdoor Advertising

Diego & Dora @ Children's Museum
Originally uploaded by DanEntin

I'm a big believer in the power of outdoor advertising, especially in urban areas. This is a picture of an ad for a Diego and Dora exhibit at the Children's Museum of Manhattan that can be found on NYC telephone booths around the city right now. To prove my point about effectiveness, when I first saw this ad a month or so ago I mentioned the exhibit to a number of friends in the area who also have young children. No fewer than three people mentioned that they had also seen these ads.

NY Times on Edgewater Square project

Last Wednesday, the New York Times published an article about the Edgewater Square development project in the New Jersey town where I currently live ("Shops Claim a Once-Gritty Waterfront"). The article discusses the other major retail shopping centers in Edgewater so I thought it would be useful to create a map indicating where these centers are in town and in relation to each other.

The article focuses on the positive aspects of the growth of Edgewater in the last 10 years and how it has created a market for new and upscale retail shopping areas.  An entirely separate article could be written about the explosion in residential development that has been seen over that time with even greater intensity in the last 5 years. Numerous condominiums were still being completed as the bottom of the real estate market fell out. It will be interesting to see how once these are completed if there will be empty units. If so this could put further downward pressure on the local housing market.

The main downside of both the retail and residential surge is traffic. Edgewater has just one thoroughfare, River Road, along which all condos and shopping centers lie. On Saturdays the traffic is already painful. There's little that can be done to alleviate this as Edgewater and River Rd are bound tightly by the Palisade cliffs and the Hudson River. I shudder to think what the Edgewater Square will do to worsen traffic.

Though it clearly focused only on the positive, I was glad to see such a nice piece about where I live in the Times. Not all my neighbors agree, as you can read in the local online message board, 07020.com. It has this thread about the article, where there is some frustration about the exclusion of the "costs of development" in the article.

Is OpenTable working on its own review database?

Last Saturday night, my wife and I had the (increasingly rare) opportunity to go out for a nice dinner and we stayed fairly local choosing Frank's Waterside in North Bergen, NJ.  Having made this and many other dinner reservations through OpenTable, I was surprised to get an email from them two days later entitled, "How was Frank's Waterside?".  I'd never received a follow-up email like this and when I clicked on the link in the email I was taken to this "feedback form":

The stated purpose of the form is to "create Top 10 Lists for the OpenTable website and to provide feedback to restaurants." I find this to be a very interesting move on OpenTable's part and I have to wonder if they have grander ambitions than they let on.  OpenTable is in an incredibly unique and desirable position when it comes to restaurant reviews: they actually know where and when you ate.

Currently OpenTable links out to its partner websites (e.g. Zagat, Citysearch, Time Out) for reviews for its restaurants. I could see OpenTable replacing these review links or giving priority to its own reviews once they have critical mass. It seems like they're in the early stages of this program - I only found one other blogger who mentioned getting a similar email and it was also in the last few weeks.

Update (4/14/08): This post is an edited version of the original published on April 4, 2008.

From Z to A

After nearly 4 years as the lead interactive Product Manager and the head of mobile I left my position with Zagat Survey last month to join About.com. I'm extremely proud of what I accomplished with my colleagues and partners during my tenure. ZAGAT.com has evolved from merely an HTML rendering of the printed guide to a beautifully designed rich internet application. And the launch of ZAGAT.mobi has been a huge success culminating for me with the inclusion in an iPhone commercial in my last weeks with the company. 

Some people have asked me whether I left because of the imminent sale of the company. This wasn't really a factor for me. I actually think it will be good for the company and (most) employees. I hope that they find a partner or acquiror who has demonstrated superior success in digital media and who can use that expertise, and a greater stomach for the necessary investment, to further extract the digital potential of Zagat. There's a lot more room for growth. My leaving was really about finding new opportunities and challenges with more space to grow.

In joining About.com I'm taking on the role of Director of Product Management for ConsumerSearch.com, a product review site that About.com and the New York Times Company acquired last May. The model is that we use writers and editors to write comparison reports and make product recommendations using the best editorial and user review sources on the web. Think Consumer Reports meets Metacritic meets About.com. I really believe in the model because despite the vast troves of information that the Web 2.0 and user-generated content movements have created, people, now more than ever, need filters (see Newsweek's recent "Revenge of the Experts"). In many ways this is the same principle at the core of the Zagat methodology.

What attracted me most to this position was that The New York Times Company has committed to investing significantly in ConsumerSearch.com this year and I will be leading the efforts to relaunch the brand and redesign the site. I'm already neck-deep and extremely excited. 

Though my professional life no longer involves restaurants or mobile content, you'll likely still hear from me on those topics as they're both still a big part of my personal life. We'll see what new topics my new role brings out.

Onward and upward ...

New iPhone commercial featuring Zagat

Last night Apple introduced a new iPhone commercial called "The Great Thing", the third new iPhone commercial this week. The premise is how having access to the internet "in your pocket" can help you on a ski vacation - view the trail map, find a restaurant and book a later flight home.

To "find a good place to eat in town" the ad features ZAGAT.mobi, which I spent much of the last year creating and promoting, which is an absolute thrill. Quite a bit has been written about the impact of the iPhone on mobile web usage and I can confirm its impact on Zagat.  So far this month iPhone is far and away the most common handset used to access ZAGAT.mobi - four times greater than the next most common handset (the BlackBerry 8830). Long live the iPhone.

Mo Rocca Spends 5 Minutes with the Zagats (Uncut)

LX.TV (recently acquired by NBC) creates lifestyle video content in NYC and LA.  They have a "5 Minutes With ..." interview segment that they do and they use Mo Rocca (of Comedy Central fame) as the talent.  This is the uncut version of his interview with Tim and Nina Zagat which is pretty funny.

Thoughts on the New Jersey Presidential Primary

The New Jersey Presidential primary election is just two days a way and I still have not decided which Democratic candidate I will vote for.  I've come across some interesting media in the last few days about the Obama vs. Clinton decision that I wanted to share.

The first is "The Test", a phenomenal article by John Heilemann and the cover story in the latest issue of New York Magazine. The piece does a great job of profiling the two candidates and boiling down the decision that Democrats are faced with to its essence:

If you find yourself drawn to the Clinton candidacy, you likely believe that politics is politics, that partisanship isn’t transmutable, that Republicans are for the most part irredeemable. You suspect that talk of transcendence amounts to humming “Kumbaya” past the graveyard. You believe that progress comes only with a fight, and that Clinton is better equipped than Obama (or maybe anyone) to succeed in the poisonous, fractious environment that Washington is now and ever shall be. You ponder the image of Bill as First Laddie and find yourself smiling, not sighing or shrieking.

If you find yourself swept up in Obamamania, on the other hand, you regard this assessment as sad, defeatist, as a kind of capitulation. You’re perfectly aware that politics is often a dirty business. But you believe it could be a bit cleaner, a bit nobler, a bit more sustaining. You think that paradigm shifts can happen, that the system can be rebooted. Most of all, an attraction to Obama indicates you are, on some level, a romantic. You never had your JFK, your MLK, and you desperately crave one: What you want is to fall in love.

A vote for Clinton, in other words, is a wager rooted in hard-eyed realism. Her upside may be limited, but so is her downside, because although the ceiling on her putative presidency might be low, the floor beneath it is fairly high. A vote for Obama, as the Big Dog said, is indeed a role of the dice. The risks of his hypothetical presidency are higher, but the potential payoff is greater: He could be the next Jack Kennedy—or the next Jimmy Carter. The gamble here entails both the thrill and the terror of letting yourself dream again.

The other piece is a video interview with an average New Yorker who was planning on voting for John Edwards but is now left deciding between Obama and Clinton: Undecided in New York

I still haven't come to a final decision, but I now may be leaning in one direction.

I also wanted to share that I recently found out that independent or unaffiliated voters can vote in the Presidential primary election in New Jersey by declaring a party affiliation at the polling place (this is not the case in New York). So if you're one of those people there's no excuse not to vote on Tuesday.

New Year, New Media Diet

I only made it half-way through Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy book (though I did just throw it back in my backpack with the intent to finish). However I have taken one of his key messages about managing the "bits" (the sum of the digital info we consume) to heart for the new year.  That message is that one way to manage the avalanche of bits we are becoming overwhelmed by is to simply reduce the bits. I have such a voracious new media appetite that I have found myself drowning in email and blog subscriptions.  I've also noticed significant overlap in the content of many of my subscriptions . So I've begun a massive campaign to unsubscribe and it feels GOOD.  I'm not looking to cut myself off from the information that I care about so I am keeping the sources that are most valuable and comprehensive. And because of the great Viigo RSS reader for my BlackBerry, which makes it easy to keep track of what I have and haven't read and catch up on information nearly any time and anywhere, I am leaning more towards blogs and away from email newsletters (call me old-fashioned but I still like these).  So if you're feeling a little overwhelmed yourself, start thinking about that unsubscribe link.

NY Waterway raising fares by 25%

NY Waterway, a company that provides ferry shuttles from Northern New Jersey coastal towns to Manhattan, has announced a fare increase of 25% for the Edgewater ferry. Citing rising fuel costs the fare increase will go into effect January 1, 2008 raising one-way tickets from $8 to $10. Other ferry routes will see similar increases. Commuting by NY Waterway is already significantly more expensive than commuting by NJ Transit bus, which serves nearly all the same towns. This increase will make taking the ferry even more of a luxury.