Well - a few days ago the Toronto Donation Drive 2006 came to an end. In total, users submitted 744 reviews and 189 pictures, raising a total of $466.50.
Being as I love round numbers so much, I have decided to up the total donated.
Tomorrow I will be sending a cheque of $1,000 dollars to the Assaulted Women’s Helpline. I’m very happy to have worked with them, and look forward to our next Donation Drive 
It took a while, but it finally got done.
We had moved to the new db server a while ago (Pretty trivial move), but because of quite a bit of … voodoo magic, moving the web server was not so easy. It has been done now, and everything should be running smooth.
We essentially have 15x the horsepower we had 15 days ago.
If anything seems broken/out of place, drop a comment here.
And the march has begun! I am very happy to announce that iBegin Ottawa is now live and ready for use. There is a slight issue with the Google Maps integration (quite a few major roads are just referred to as ‘Regional Road XX’ but we are trying to get a status update on that (and if need be, switch to a different mapping provider).
iBegin Toronto has now been live for just over 7 months. We now feature over 43,000 listings in Toronto (this is not the entire GTA but ‘Toronto’ itself). For those listings, 5,145 have a website url associated with them, 6,065 have descriptions, 1,607 have pictures, and 837 have business hours. We do roughly 10-25 database updates a day, helping ensure that our data is as accurate as possible. Based on that confidence, I do wish there was a way of comparing the accuracy of data between companies. There was a good discussion at Screenwerk about how local accuracy is very hard to attain (and I did throw in one of our ideas there), but unfortunately no real methodology of comparison. If anyone does know of a way, leave a comment or contact us.
One thing I aimed for when we launched was simplicity but with power behind it. Case in point: frontpage search box. It was just a single input box, but if you read the advanced link, you would find out that you could search for places near an address (physical or intersection), you could search for places on a street, you could search for a phone number, etc etc.
Unfortunately, many people missed this power and glossed over it. It also required a bit more effort to type in - eg ‘restaurants near 18 yorkville’ instead of ‘restaurants [tab] 18 yorkville’
With that in mind, we have released an updated version of the frontpage. It now has dual input boxes - one for the what, and one for the where. The inner pages also contain the two input boxes for searches.
We have also released support for neighbourhoods. Just another feature for the where input.
Lastly - iBegin as a site is now pretty much set. This means that with the impending release of iBegin Ottawa this friday, other cities should be supported soon.