iBegin Blog

We’ve gone ahead and added some much needed ‘little’ features to iBegin Source - Print this Page, Email a Friend, and Embed This.

While the first two are quite standard-fare, the third one is interesting - you can now embed a YP listing directly on your website. No branding, and you have complete control over how it looks.

For example, Shea Stadium:

The possibilities are endless. Because of its customization, you can do a wide variety of things. Want to quickly embed a map (without having to go through the ‘hassle’ of setting it up yourself or even using a map customizer?). Done. Want to provide an address (that will stay up-to-date). Done. Business owner wanting to show a simple map and relevant contact info? Done.

The end result is you can embed business info (as however you want it) in under a minute. With a map. With no branding.

The circular loop-back to iBegin City sites is finally happening …

Sometimes last year, we came to the realization that we were not only at the whim of data providers (who have a nice policy of charging you more based on how popular your website is - the harder you work, the more they make), but also constrained by them. While a 90% may be an A in university, in local search missing 10% makes you look bad. Real bad.

So we took the initiative to build our source of data. We had dealt in databases in many other fields (including aggregate city data), and thus had some associates in the data-business. It was important, for us to grow as an organically-funded business, to not be constrained by the demands of such companies.

As we moved along with data acquisition, we realized we had some issues - geocoding (geocoding is the process of taking a physical address and converting it into GPS coordinates). While geocoding even 100,000 records is not a big deal, 15,000,000 records is a big deal. Most of the major geocoding companies wanted at least $100,000 to geocode them. So we set out on creating an in-house solution - again - not having to depend on an external source for this data.

With all of this in place, we now controlled the entire process - from A to Z.

So we were very proud when we launched iBegin Source. And the results have been fairly positive. End-users have been using the site as a basic YellowPages - the site is on pace to generate over 750,000 pageviews in the next 31 days. End users and business owners have been submitted/updating their business listings - we passed the 1000 mark a while ago, and I am looking forward to breaking 10,000 very soon.

But our focus hasn’t just been on the raw data. We have been listening to what users want, what users are doing, and so forth. The most common request was: weather. So we spent a few weeks and created a weather site.

So - the next 30-60 days are very exciting. We will have two major updates:
1. iBegin Source will expand to Canada. The #1 requested feature for iBegin Source (largely owing to our Canadian start I am sure)
2. iBegin v3 - this will streamline the site, giving more direct local features (ie weather, movie times, guides, news, etc). It will also simplify the distinction between cities (eg profiles are partially ‘locked’ to a city right now).

I am very excited about where we are headed - an independent company making a noticeable dent in local.

The most commonly requested feature we get from users is weather.

And so today I am happy to announce the launch of iBegin Weather.

Simple and fast loading, it gives you the weather you quickly need. Some links:
Toronto Weather
RSS feed for Toronto Weather
Put Toronto Weather on your website/blog.

Weather will be tightly integrated into the new version of iBegin.