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Cool New GuideMe Feature We Just Launched

June 29, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

One of the features I’ve been most excited about with GuideMe just came out yesterday.

Simply put, we’re monitoring hundreds of daily deal sites and then notifying people of daily deals that exactly match the places that they’ve saved on their GuideList as a To-Do or a Love.

This solves the problem of not wanting to subscribe to a ton of deal services and get a bunch of emails every day for deals that don’t interest you. You just see deals for places you want. Simple.

Personally, I’m not a frequent deal buyer. Although, when a deal is available for a place that I have been meaning to try or a place that I’ve loved in the past, why would I not want to know about it?

Unfortunately this isn’t available in all cities yet, just most of the big high tech cities at the moment. We’ll roll out to more cities over time based on what cities grow in popularity on GuideMe.

Filed Under: Random

GuideMe Is Open For Business!

June 23, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

GuideMe MapAfter months of hard work, it felt great to open up the startup I cofounded (GuideMe) to the public last week. Feedback and usage has been pretty good so far, although we have high expectations and know we need to keep building, listening to users, and improving the product to make their local lives better.

GuideMe is your local To-Do List. It’s super easy to build your list of places you’d like to go, where you’ve been, and what you’ve loved.

Despite all the online tools that exist, we still primarily rely on friends and people we know to get great recommendations for restaurants, bars, shops, hotels, landmarks, and everything else. We’re working on scaling those recommendations from friends, making it easier to get them, save them, and share your own.

We’re striving to make it easy to build and manage your local To-Do list, and to provide people with a ton of value that will make it seem worthwhile to use GuideMe.

I’d love for the long-time readers of this blog to sign up, kick some tires, and pass along any feedback whether it’s good or bad.

GuideMe Social Connections

Filed Under: GuideMe

Does Multiple Messaging Systems Solve Email Overload?

June 12, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

Weird...11111 messages in my inboxphoto © 2009 Chad Swaney | more info (via: Wylio)
If you’ve spent much time working in a heavy tech related job, you’ll quickly learn how annoying email can be. No matter who you are, it’s rare that you don’t at some point feel overwhelmed by the number of emails staring at you in your inbox.

Numerous tech luminaries have written about email overload, including going as far as declaring email bankruptcy. The concept of “inbox zero” is often tweeted about as a fantasy land where you actually have replied to, deleted, or processed every email in your inbox.

There are even multiple investor-backed startups such as Unsubcribe.com or ccLoop who are working at solving the “email problem”.

This was brought up again recently in an article on Techcrunch by MG Siegler about Tumblr’s new messaging system. While it looks like a pretty standard application messaging system, MG is excited about it as another place he can get messages that isn’t his email inbox. MG writes:

Yes, all of this stuff is rudimentary for a messaging system. But again, it does offer a small email relief in that it’s a new system with a slightly higher barrier to entry (you need to have a Tumblr account, unless you choose to allow anonymous messages). Mixed with Facebook Messages, Twitter, Twitter DMs, group messaging apps (Beluga, GroupMe, etc), and soon iMessage, I have a bunch of small work-arounds to avoid the nightmare that is my email inbox.

MG’s solution actually seems like the opposite of a solution to me. I have a personal Tumblr site like MG does, a Twitter account, Facebook account, the blog you’re reading, a LinkedIn account, a Quora account, and other various applications where I can get messages. I actually feel more overwhelmed by all the different places I have to go to gather the messages meant for me, then I do from the number of emails in my inbox.

When all the messages meant for me are coming to my inbox, I can handle them without switching to different systems, I can use filters, I can use labels/folders, and can do it all on one device without switching from mobile to PC. How does breaking up my messages across all these different applications actually lessen the burden? Does it lower the quantity or increase the quantity?

If anything maybe there is mental value of getting some variety by getting out of email, but I actually think the fragmentation of messaging takes up more time and makes me more likely to miss something.

Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I just don’t get as much email as some of those who have complained publicly about it. I’ve led numerous teams of 30 people or less, and while I was at Yahoo! there were definitely some times in which a lot of email was coming my way.

I’ve tended to be able to handle the email load through effective filtering, keeping my subscriptions to lists and commercial newsletters to a minimum, and realizing the more email I send the more likely I am to get email in return.

But, I’m also not a tech journalist or notable venture capitalist so it’s quite possible I just haven’t felt the pain as badly where breaking up messages across multiple applications seems like a welcome thing. Someday…

Filed Under: Random

Looks Like the iAd Hasn’t Cracked Mobile Advertising

June 7, 2011 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

Apple's iAd Hasn't Cracked Mobile Advertising

Over a year after Apple announced the iAd advertising format that was supposed to revolutionize mobile advertising, we heard absolutely nothing about it at yesterday’s developer conference in San Francisco.

Apple trotted out impressive stats about all kinds of things, but there was no mention about iAd penetration, revenue driven, or new capabilities.

Apple doesn’t really miss opportunities to talk about their success, so it’s probably safe to say that the iAd has been a bit of a disappointment so far.

The Hope

When Apple launched the iAd, people had high hopes for what they might be able to do for the mobile advertising industry. A lot of the common thinking was that Apple had revolutionized so many other industries, that perhaps they could do something new and amazing with these high quality mobile ads.

While Apple wasn’t in the advertising business like other companies, people thought their creativity and successful ad campaigns of their own might allow them to take mobile advertising to a new level.

Not so fast my friend.

The Results

Dan Frommer from AlleyInsider did an article about the iAd progress in March. Some notable things in it were that the price of iAds was cut in half, there was a mixed reaction from agencies, and that the iAd sales team had lost a bunch of people.

Outside of the advertising industry, I don’t feel like the iAd has had much impact either. As a user of many iPhone apps, I can’t ever recall even seeing an iAd. Perhaps I have, but if so it definitely wasn’t memorable. And I’m somebody who actually cares about advertising!

The Future

Apple can obviously choose to do what they want and experiment wherever they want. However, I’m not sure advertising is in their core DNA. After all, at the developer conference yesterday Steve Jobs himself said in reference to their mail product:

“No ads,” he boasted. “We build products that we want for ourselves, too, and we just don’t want ads.”

That doesn’t sound like the CEO of a company that really is 100% behind mobile advertising.

Has Jobs learned that “mobile display ads” don’t work? Has Apple just struggled to gain traction?

Or perhaps, is mobile advertising just going to really take off when it’s entirely different and more of the form of location-based deals? But doesn’t that only work for local businesses? How do national brands get in front of people on their mobile device?

The answers still aren’t there, but as more of people’s computing time AND entertainment time shifts to their mobile devices, you can bet there will be a lot of companies trying to figure out how to get in front of people. Just don’t expect Apple to solve it.

Filed Under: Advertising