Q. What is guiaslocal.com?

A.  GuiasLocal.com is a new, non-yellow page, bilingual start-up that connects consumers to major U.S. cities and millions of businesses.  Guias Local translated in English means “Local Guides” (a logical name for Hispanics and search algorithm when searching locally).  The primary language of GuiasLocal.com is Spanish with a secondary language in English.  Currently GuiasLocal.com, is the largest bilingual, non-yellow page in the United States.

Q. What is its mission?

A. Our mission is to change Local search and offer Hispanics a new way to search.  With so many English language local search companies in the mix, we feel we can add value to an emerging market.

Q. You have just gotten beta in El Paso, what is the timeline for other cities?

A.  On Monday, December 7th, we will be launching our second version of Beta for El Paso, based on feedback from consumers and businesses.  This version offers more in regards to search and features.
Our full launch of our 200 major U.S. cities is scheduled for early 2010.  This version will include additional enhancements to GuiasLocal.com including white labels, private labels, and mobile versions.  We will be adding additional cities growing quickly.

Q. Are you looking at producing any iPhone or Blackberry mobile apps or site for the directory?

A. Mobile versions of GuiasLocal.com are currently in development.  As more Hispanics adapt to mobile applications faster than non-Hispanics, mobile apps are a top priority for GuiasLocal.com.  Our mobile versions will offer easy navigation and a fast search.

Q. Are there any other bilingual local search directories out there?

A.  There are no other bilingual, non yellow page, nationwide, local searches in the U.S.  There is a yellow page company named Seccion Amarilla Usa, a Telmex company, which offers results in two languages.  Yellow page companies tend to focus on print and not on the Internet or mobile applications.  Our enhanced version of GuiasLocal.com will offer our consumers an easy to use local search in two languages as well, GuiasLocal.com offers businesses the opportunity to reach consumers with various levels of advertising available at a significantly reduced rate as compared to yellow page companies.

Q. Why should small business be concerned with bilingual listings?

A. Hispanics are the largest growing minority in the United States.  As well, given  that  almost  half  of Hispanics  speak  only Spanish  at  home,  products  that  offer easy  directions  and  a  bilingual  user  interface will  gain  faster  adoption.   What’s more, one-third  of  Hispanics  feel  that  Spanish-language  Web  sites  enhance  their  user experience — a clear message for online retailers and marketers.  Why not offer the consumer the opportunity to search in both languages?  GuiasLocal.com offers Hispanics a choice, their choice of which language to search in.

Q. How can a business get listed in your directory?

A. Businesses can either contact GuiasLocal.com directly to place their business in our search.  Upon launch, we will offer a business submission where the business can add all of their information via GuiasLocal.com as well as manage their listing.  This will be available in early 2010 with our full launch.

Q. Where do you see local search marketing going in the next year or so?

A.  Local search marketing is growing at a rate of 17 percent according to Forrester Research.  GuiasLocal.com knows the true value is in becoming a brand and an information provider not just a local search.  We are currently working on this with: Private label (powered by GuiasLocal.com), Apps, API’s, licensing, desktop, mobile, and business packages.

Q. Anything else you would like to add?

A. We recently added dotcom veteran, Tom Herman, to our board who has been guiding GuiasLocal.com strategically in our money raising efforts. You may remember Tom from the movie, Startup.com. The film followed e-commerce website govWorks.com and its founders, Tom and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, from 1999-2000 as the Internet bubble was bursting. Under their leadership, govWorks raised $60 million in venture financing from firms such as the Mayfield Fund, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, the New York City Investment Fund, Hearst Corporation, Sapient Corporation and Vignette Corporation.  Tom brings over 15 years of start-up experience leading technical strategy, software architecture, fund raising and mergers and acquisitions of technical assets.

Twitter: We are the most followed Hispanic brand on Twitter World Wide.

–Thanks for that info George on Guiaslocal.com.  Look forward to seeing how your site grows and develops.

Q. Tell us a little about yourself.
A. I have been marketing online since 1998. My first successes came in affiliate marketing. I learned from some of the Internet marketing coaches of the early 2000’s about being able to reach your audience and provide value. I pride myself on providing value to the market place. Having a vast knowledge of many areas of Internet marketing allows me to apply different techniques at different times of a campaign. I am the V.President of Melodie’s Exchange, a local search marketing company, specializing in organic SEO and SEM.

Q. What do you do for small, local businesses?
A. I give them the freedom of being able to dominate their local niche or profession. Our job is to do Internet marketing so they can do their job and not be an Internet marketer plus whatever their profession is. We make the doors swing and the phone ring so they can get paid. There are various ways of getting them more front page listings for keywords leading back to them and the product or service.

Q. What recommendations would you give a small business that wants to promote themselves online?
A. I would recommend hiring my company, of course, LOL. Seriously, I would recommend setting up accounts with the major outlets. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and a blog. This is plenty enough to get started and put their message, brand, and personality out there to attract others that want, need, or like what they have. It is best to do it as soon as possible because their competitor still may be wondering if they should do it or not. This will give them an opportunity to get a head start on them and gain a competitive advantage. Once you are there, be yourself and do not spam your links on every one’s wall, but be engaging and answer questions that may come up in your niche and provide value. Then lead them to your products or services by suggesting they take a look for more details or greater insight to a problem.

Q. We connected via Twitter, Facebook…why are you on these sites?
A. I am on Twitter and Facebook because there are millions of customers there. One of the great things about using social networking sites is customers and prospective clients can give suggestions, critiques and accolades in real time and you as a biz owner are able to talk back to them. This makes for a dialogue as well as the feeling of being personal. Now the client can do business with me and not a brand. Put a face to the brand or logo and personalize the selling process. I can make suggestions about a product or service and know pretty fast how to adjust future sales.

Q. Do you think small business should be on these social networks?
A. Absolutely. Why? For the reasons that I stated above. Instead of push push push advertising, social media marketing gives the opportunity for both parties to communicate and the small business owner can make adjustments as needed. The small business persons competitor is not the traditional competitor. The competition has changed and has become a 14 or 15 yr old doing stuff on these very same sites. Using these sites as a way to get their message out and sell stuff just like everyone else. So the landscape has changed and the small business owner had better take notice and ride the wave or they will become like the rabbit ears on black and white televisions.

Q. Where do you see online social networks going in the future?
A. I see even more social networks in the future because other companies will want to add their spin on what is already a wildly successful way of marketing, advertising, and branding. Mostly of which is free to use, except for the time of course. There will be more to try and knock off YouTube and Facebook.

Q. Why is SEM important for small business today?
A. SEM is important for small business because of the vast changes being made in Internet technology. This change is taking place with or without small businesses and there are tons of competitors and customers online doing business already. SEM will allow businesses to strategically be found by the people and consumers that need to find them and this is absolutely paramount. It makes closing the deal almost a non factor because the consumer has found you.

Q. For a small business just starting online, what would you tell them?
A. To be careful with their advertising budgets because there are so many companies that will promise the sun, the moon and stars only to under deliver and over charge. I would tell them to see what is working for  their competitors and emulate that and put their own stamp on it. That it is OK to think differently within the parameters of SEM marketing using rich media to go along with traditional marketing.

Q. Finally, where do you see Internet marketing going over the next few years?
A. This is a question that is pretty difficult to answer. In my 11 plus years of online marketing I have seen changes come almost without warning and leave just as fast. In the next few yrs I see or think that local search will become more vital due to the so many mobile phone and applications that are associated with them. They will allow for local info on the go, especially in urban areas as people search for info while driving or walking city blocks. Internet marketing will become very interactive between buyer and sellers of different products.

–Thanks Jimmy for your time and some great insights.

Overall I like the app for the following reasons:

• easy to use interface
• excellent response time
• none or minimal memory leak
• was built specifically for the Storm
• great price tag
• company stands behind product

For some great screen shots, check out their  product website and click on the different components listed.

After testing the app, I sat down with Dan and picked his brain about fone book.

Q. Dan, one the big things, with Storm users is memory leakage. Did you guys test this?
A . We have designed the fone book to have a small device footprint and a very low operational memory overhead. With the app on and running in background, our bench-testing has been unable to detect any negligible additional drain on battery life.  We have done a significant amount of memory leakage and security testing on the fone  book. In over 100 hours of bench-testing, we have not been able to detect any memory leakage what so ever. Both memory leakage and security have been concerns of ours from the early stages of our development process.

Q. How does fone book search listings?
A. This comes close to some proprietary information but I can give you a generic answer. We use a couple of logic streams, one for People Search and one for Business Search. However, both use a 35-mile radius logic when either no exact match is found to a specifically named search target, or if you are searching within a general business category. The search system is something that we consider to be a continual work-in-progress for us.  Our data partner has been extremely helpful to us and has permitted us a wide range of input into the development of our search system. So this is something that will only get better as time and experience build and user feedback comes in.

Q. Where do you get your data from?
A. While not at liberty to name names at this point. For a typical user of the fone book or for anyone using a search tool of any type, they don’t want all of the answers to everything “ they only want the right answer to their query – now.

At the present we work with a data aggregation company. This firm draws data from three of the top directory sources in the US for our residential search and two of the top data sources for business search.

Q. Does fone book use the Storm’s GPS features?
A. No. Using the GPS as part of an upcoming upgrade/enhancement is under consideration, but there are two main reasons that I don’t feel that it is a core to our product. First, GPS as a feature has a number of user experience drawbacks and I don’t feel that it is one of the stronger features of the BlackBerry Storm. When implemented on our test application, it created memory leaks, degraded battery life and inhibited the speed of result delivery to the user. For now, we feel that until the GPS feature is significantly improved, we would just as soon not include it in our app. The second reason we have not included GPS is due to user feedback.

Q. What makes fone book different?
A.  The fone book does one thing and does it very, very well. But to more clearly articulate what differentiates us from the rest of the din in the market, I would have to say that first and foremost, it is our orientation. This is an app that was literally built by and for Storm users. We have resisted the temptation to build in opulent features, complicated menu trees and multi-step processes.

All that we wanted to do was to build a useful tool for BlackBerry Storm users. We wanted to build something useful to a broad spectrum of users whether they were a business user, a road warrior, a soccer mom or just someone who wanted a good phone that did more.  It needed to be something that would be used every day and would be as useful and used in 2 years as it would be in the first 30 days.

It is fairly innovative to show all the necessary information in one, single frame for the user. So if you have a contact, you can see the address, the phone number and can see the map of where that contact is located, all without having to page from one view to another. Fast, easy and efficient.  Then, within the same view, you can click-to-call or click-to-add to your contacts. All without a lot of complicated intervening screens and menus. To summarize, our main difference is that the fone book is a small, simple app that does what we say it will do. It does it very, very well and adds to the value of the Storm as an advanced, smart tool to the end user – all for a reasonable price.

Q. Speaking of price, what sort of price tag are we looking at?
A. We are being very aggressive here.  The trend in the greater BlackBerry apps eco-system for high price concerned us. We didn’t want to contribute to that trend, so we set $2.99 as our full retail price. Now I want to caution you. That is a lifetime price, not a 6-month service price and includes updates and email support for as long as you own your Storm.

Q. What are future upgrade plans?
A. We have a lot of ideas for future upgrades as well as other products along this same line for the future. First would be to fully integrate the BlackBerry Contacts into the fone book search UI. That would mean that if I am looking for someone and they exist in my contacts, the would be displayed in the fone book search results along with the same data display as is now done for search contact details.

Next, we are looking at the possibility of adding reverse search by address, in addition to reverse search by phone number. Then you can find, neighbors and people near by from your fone book. Then there is always working through the issues of GPS and beginning to find a way to bring that functionality into the fone book and add to the user experience at the same time. The one thing that we intend to do in moving forward though is to listen. We want to hear from our users.

Q. Where do you search mobile search going in the near future?
A. To me mobile search has had a bad rap up until now and for good reason. To this point, developers and applications have tried to take the desktop computer search experience and replicate it on mobile devices. It hasn’t really worked.

Mobile devices are getting closer to the speed of desk-top computing, but let’s face it is a tinny screen and doesn’t have the computing power, so it just isn’t working. The user experience is not what it should be and the overall performance of the search applications just doesn’y fit in the small box environment of mobile devices. Apps like ours specific or spot solution search tools  seem to fit this mobile environment far better than the search portal concept. The user experience is far superior and the utility and functionality of search as a function becomes far more human tool oriented when this approach is applied. Users benefit, mobile carriers benefit and those app developers who tap into this will benefit. To me, this is the necessary direction of search in the mobile device eco-system.

Congrats to Dan and BlindingRain on great new app for the Storm. As of this writing, the app should be available from Mobihand – more details to follow.

Q. Why did you decide to make a mobile app also?
A. I believe mobile is the purest form of local.  I also noticed that the IYPs rushed to the marketplace basic mobile apps.  Although they are good applications, most of the IYP companies just don’t get it when it comes to getting it right for mobile.  The core technology behind many of the IYP platforms don’t seem to be properly optimized and/or structured to offer relevant and personal search results. We thought that was a better way. And we set out to create it.

Q. Where do you see mobile search going in the next few years?
A. The mobile application that gets it right will move toward a personal advisor system that has the ability to learn, store, and predict your needs based on you search habits.  It will be able to offer quick, local, relevant, and personal (anonymous) information for the consumer.

Q. Is there any special features of the app that you do not have on the standard website?
A. With our iphone app, consumers can find local business information including driving, biking and walking directions to a desired location. As well as its unique accuracy, iLPS presents you with a map view first, so you can quickly determine which businesses are nearest to your present location. iLPS is truly a local positioning system for mobile searchers, as they can retrieve a map and business listing with only one tap.

Q. Currently it is for the iPhone and iPod touch, will any other platform be coming out?
A. As the iPhone dominates the smartphone consumer market for sales, YellowSpaces has invested in that platform first. Our next phase will be to develop an application for BlackBerry and then continue to monitor the market for other smartphone platforms that gain traction.

Q. Is there a mobile friendly version of the site?
A. YellowSpaces also offers a mobile site, http://m.yellowspaces.com for consumers with any smartphone to access our local search engine.

Here are a couple screen shots:

You can download this app via your iPhone by searching iLPS. Thanks again to Constantin S. Manta of YellowSpaces for your time and good luck with the new site.

Well, Constantin S. Manta, the man behind this site,  was gracious to give me some time for this interview so you and I could learn more about this new search engine. Today I have two posts regarding YellowSpaces. This one will cover YellowSpaces in general and the second post will cover their new iPhone app which launches today.

Q. Thanks again Constantin for the time, can you tell us a little about you and your company.
A. I’m the founder and principal of YellowSpaces.  For the past 20 years I have worked with Internet advertising agencies and financial services companies primarily offering them financial services. I noticed a growing frustration with my clients when they tried to find reliable on- and offline advertising resources, including print yellow pages and local search engines.

Inspired by this frustration, I saw a need for more reliability and so YellowSpaces was born to create a unique and relevant search engine to appeal to smaller businesses across the U.S. As well, we think that consumers are looking for the most accurate business information, too.

Q. What is YellowSpaces and what makes it unique?
A. YellowSpaces is a new local search engine that focuses on finding businesses, products, or services anywhere throughout the United States.’  What makes it unique is that it offers more information to users more accurately and reliably than any other search engine. It’s also easier to use than the Internet or Apple’s iPhone.

Q. How can a small business get listed in YellowSpaces?
A. On our search results page we have a link for business owners to list their companies.

Q. Is Localeze the only source for business data for YellowSpaces?
A. Yes. We researched the field thoroughly and determined that Localeze offers the most current and dependable local search information.  What helps make Localeze a real benefit to our users is their rating system they call it a Confidence Score.

The confidence score is a grade,  an evaluation of the validity of the information about the local business. The higher the score, in the range from 0-100, the more accurate and dependable are the search results. When we do a search, we show the confidence score of that business right on the screen for the user to see.

Q. Do you have business reviews on the side?
A. Not at the moment. We might offer them in the future as a recommendation shown with a simplified graphic (e.g., thumbs up, thumbs down). We can probably define and make these recommendations from a consensus of opinion from other Internet Yellow Pages ( IYPs) rather than producing a long narrative presentation of our own.

Q. Did you launch nationally or are you doing it in increments?
A. Our original plan was to launch in the New York tri-state market, however, the introduction of the iPhone application into our overall strategy made it clear that we needed to launch nationally.

Q. You and I have initially connected on Twitter and I see you are using that quite a bit.  Why do you use Twitter? Where to you see Twitter going in the near future?
A. For one thing, @yellowspaces gathers and reports news within the local search and IYP space. You see, Twitter is one of the most effective business tools on the market. It’s a wonderful marketing tool.

For example, we did a fun and keyword strategic 10-day countdown before launching our website. We used specific keywords in our tweets to attract the media.  Although I have around 200 follows, and that isn’t a very large audience, Twitter is not about followers. It’s about timely knowledge. And timely knowledge is important.  Twitter search and other tools give everyone access to your tweets.

For example, if you are a blogger who writes about start-ups, I can go into Twitter and search for the term start-up and pull companies that may be launching now. I believe Twitter will become another business customer service channel to the consumer.

Q. Where do you see local search going in the next few years?
A. Even with all the interest in local search, we really are still at the dawn of this application.  As international business becomes more interdependent, there is a growing need for international local search. In a few years, we will want to be able to search locally anywhere in the world.

YellowSpaces is able to duplicate our technology internationally right now, and expand quickly into any country. We had the foresight to purchase and secure most of the domain names in the top 25 international by population and/or gross domestic product.  We have trademarked YellowSpaces internationally, too. Our goal is to become the globally-branded local search destination.

Q. Andrew what is the story about GPS in Blackberry phones and Verizon?
A. The short answer is before the Storm, Verizon has locked the GPS feature in its phones to any 3rd party app. Well with the Storm, the GPS is unlocked and Poynt was developed to utilize that important feature.

(Side note: There has been a lot of arguing/debating going on why Google Maps does not use the GPS feature in the Storm, thus this question. Take a look at this post)

Q. What is the reason for Poynt?
A. With Poynt, we wanted to create a quick, user friendly, one stop shop local search app for the Blackberry.

Q. What sort of future developments of Poynt are you looking at?
A. Addition of verticals, including restaurants – allowing users to discover and reserve tables,  development for additional platforms including iPhone, Android, WinMob

Q. what is your thoughts/vision on local search?
A. Local search goes beyond discovery of the local area; it moves the consumer further into the purchase funnel.  Rather than just find out what movies are playing at your local theater, you can watch trailer, decide on movie to see, view showtimes, purchase ticket.

Local search should move beyond a singular experience to include social network; to continue the above example, the user can invite friends to the show using integration with email.

Q. What advise if any would you give the small business owner?
A. The small business owner needs to realize that we are on the front edge of the mobilization of local search. There is no silver bullet out there that will help you, the best thing to do is partner with the best distribution network or professional you can find to increase your business info distribution.

Thank you Andrew and Margaret for your time and insight. So if you have a Blackberry and need a local search app, check out Poynt  (go to http://m.mypoynt.com from your BlackBerry Browser)

Q. How can a small business profit or help themselves with outside.in?
A. We can geotarget an ad campaign to a specific place, address, intersection or latitude/longitude.  We can create a simple fixed campaign for an advertiser looking to reach customers within a very defined radius from their place of business.

If you’d like to advertise with us, drop us a line at advertise@outside.in. In addition, if you have a blog, submit your feed at http://www.outside.in/geotoolkit and let us drive traffic to you for free.

Q. Where do you see local search going in the next few years?
A. The entire model for local media is being turned upside down as we speak.  These are exciting times for new models of local news and search.  Consumers are going to increasingly turn to new sources and new platforms to find out what’s happening around them and to research and buy products and services.  I think that as this happens, new models for user  <—> small business interactions will evolve.

We expect mobile and location based services to drive a lot of this innovation.  It is not just bringing research and data from retailers to the PCs of home users, but also bringing that data closer to the offline point of sale via mobile applications.

Q. During your panel session at ILM 08, you said, you thought in a year or two, the hyperlocal material would be the keynote instead of being presented the last day. Could you explain why you feel this way?
A. We are seeing some trends that speak to the growing importance of hyperlocal and should lead to real growth for our business and those of the other panelists:

• Consumers are demanding more personalization in their content.  They set keyword alerts, rss feeds and newsletters about their individual stocks, teams, ailments, etc…, but not at all yet for local.  Today you can’t do better than a ZIP Code or a City/Town. That all changes going forward.
• More devices and applications are becoming “geo aware” — that is, knowing where you are is going to be easy. The next step is “what’s going on around me right now?” and that’s what we all do.
• There is an explosion of content being created at the hyperlocal level.  Historically there has not been enough “there there”, but with the explosion of blogging platforms, municipal data and discussion platforms like Twitter, there is an abundance of content.

It is our belief that these trends speak well for the growth of our business and that of our panelists and we should be bigger part of the local media scene going forward.

Thanks again Mark for the great insight and info. Look forward to seeing Outside.in and the online hyperlocal community grow.