The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

Local means community connection, notes Manber, and it’s happening. For example,
one of the half-dozen engineers who are working on A9’s local service took one of its
city-crawling, camera-equipped vans home for the holidays. He got a royal welcome
from his friends, and his hometown will soon be the smallest of the cities covered in
A9 Block View, for entirely personal rather than strategic reasons. (Of course, you
may think making employees feel special and connected to their work is strategic.)
Just as Brown and Hagel point out the value of friction around transactions (SEE
PAGE 30), so is there value in context around search. It helps to know what’s up and
down the street in order to determine what kind of clientele a store may have or
what kind of neighborhood a restaurant is in.
Is Block View worth the investment A9 will be making over time as it rolls out city
after city? Manber answers:“It is actually a very small investment, and that’s one of
our main innovations that made it all possible. We’re not releasing budget numbers,
so I can’t tell you exactly how much it costs. You’ll have to trust me when I say that the
costs are really minimal and are not a barrier once you get the technology right.” It
has already launched Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Denver, New York
City (Manhattan), Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco and Seattle, among
other cities. Phoenix/Scottsdale is coming soon – with luck in time for PC Forum.
Although A9 likens its business listings to yellow pages, they are currently free to the
establishments listed – including the automatic phone call service. (A9 gets its primary
business data from Axciom.) But the possibilities are quite obvious, starting
with sponsored phone calls, paid listings and the like.
A9 is a subsidiary of Amazon. Although it operates autonomously, the two services
are closely tied. Amazon powers A9’s book search and most of its personalization
features, while A9 provides general search services, especially shopping, for Amazon.
Marissa Mayer, Google: Google triplet
Marissa Mayer joined Google, then about 20 employees, in 1999. She had recently
earned her MS in computer science (after a BS in symbolic systems) and was still
teaching part-time at Stanford. She spurned an offer from McKinsey to choose
Google precisely because she felt less prepared for it than for a standard McKinsey
career. While earning her BS, she had worked as a summer intern on a “recommender”
system and felt comfortable with Google’s approach of using links to measure
relevance, but she didn’t have much experience in business. Neither, of course,
48 RELEASE 1.0 WWW.RELEASE1-0.COM