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Another launch… Ride sharing 2.0

January 17, 2008 by Michael Boyle

There was more auspicious startup news this week, this time from Ottawa, where a very talented group (partly made up of some long-term friends and former colleagues) has launched PickupPal. PickupPal is a really great idea, and I think represents a class of website/webapp that we’re going to see more and more of in coming months.

The idea is simple: it’s an online ride-sharing marketplace that uses the familiar socnet/Web2 techniques in pursuit of practical, real-world goals that go far beyond simply building and maintaining your social graph.

The other thing about PickupPal that is especially great is that ride-sharing by definition is environmentally friendly and can help people reduce their carbon footprint. We’re not all lucky enough to live in a city like (central) Montreal with world-class mass transit – and a practical, easy way to help get a few cars off the road is very timely.

Another Montreal company at Demo

January 17, 2008 by Michael Boyle

There was big news late last week that I haven’t yet mentioned here: Montreal’s Standout Jobs is Launching at DEMO 08, to be held in Palm Springs at the end of January. I was at DEMOfall in 2006 in San Diego and having been there, I know just how special an event it is. For all of the cynicism that exists in the tech/startup world, Chris Shipley and the whole DEMO team really do a great job at providing an amazing platform for any company whose up to the task of showing it, live, in just 6 minutes.

Congratulations to Ben, Fred, and Austin and the whole gang at Standout Jobs!

Rumours of Mapquest’s demise were greatly exaggerated

January 9, 2008 by Michael Boyle

I subscribe to a feed from Hitwise Intelligence, an “online competitive intelligence” firm that publishes traffic analysis on various topics on a blog. Today I found this post by Heather Hopkins: US: Google Maps Making Inroads Against Leader, Mapquest. I was very surprised to learn that not only is Mapquest still a viable site, but it remains the market leader by quite a big (though shrinking) margin over Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps.

It’s surprising because I assumed that Google’s site had long since become the market leader – which it is with pretty much everyone I know. I haven’t heard of anyone using Mapquest in years – and if you go to the site, all you find is the same barely-usable interface and sketchy, jaggedy maps as always, not to mention almost useless search results and a decided lack of actual mapping features.

There are two pretty clear reminders in this case for anyone who works in online marketing: a) the market leader isn’t necessarily who you (as a specialist) assume it is, and b) a site’s market/traffic leadership doesn’t mean that it is the one to emulate. I guess incumbency status really is important, even on the net.