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  • ZIPCodeWorld Store Locator Live – service revie...
    By on September 3rd, 2008 | 1 Comment1 Comment Comments

    I had a chance to check out and implement a service which I have been using quite commonly when shopping online on Futureshop, BestBuy or any other online shopping sites. Store locator is a very convenient way of finding the store nearest to you. ZIPCodeWorld Store Locator Live provides the exact service as the ones you use on other online shopping sites to businesses with multiple stores.

    This service is perfect for businesses with multiple stores spread across Canada, the United States as well as more than 30 other countries worldwide. With the Store Locator Live, webmasters can simply copy and paste a few lines of code into their websites without the need of handling or programming any code. It is currently available in PHP and .NET as well so it can be installed onto the local servers for more control.

    Why choose ZIPCodeWorld Store Locator Live? Well, it is currently supporting 1089 companies and total of 30692 unique stores and growing as well as over 30 countries worldwide as mentioned above. This service is free for businesses with less than 100 physical stores and/or dealers but in return you have to have a banner link back to them which is worth it. Price starts at $499.95USD for less than 500 physical stores and/or dealers, $999.95 for less than 2000 and 1,999.95 for less than 10,000. Prices are for one year subscription.

    Here are the key features and benefits from the site:

  • Secure Administrator Control Panel
  • Bulk Store/Dealer Batch Import
  • Limit Results by Radius and Records
  • Support MapQuest®/Yahoo®/Google® Location Maps & Directions
  • Display General Store Details and Custom Fields
  • Support Miles and Kilometers Measurement
  • Sort Results by Distance, Names and City
  • Support Preferred (Highlighted and Show on Top) or Hidden Stores
  • Support United States and Canada Postal Code
  • Absolutely Free for less than 100 physical stores / dealers
  • Aside from testing the Client Demo for finding the RadioShack, I registered with an account because I wanted to know more about it. The registration took less than a minute to confirm and activate my account. Once logged in, I was presented with a simple and easy to use interface where I could add stores into the system based on a ZIP code or Postal Code if you are in Canada. Or I could bulk load multiple stores using the Import feature which is a great feature if I had multiple stores, it just wouldn’t make sense to upload one by one unless I was opening new stores in the future (it has a sample import text file so I could just follow the format).

    After adding all the stores, I was able to preview what I have entered by testing the Store Locator. And finally, I just obtained the HTML code and pasted onto my site and ready to be used! (assuming I had a business with multiple stores) The process was quick, simple and to the point!

    As a related side note, ZIPCodeWorld also offers a comprehansive ZIP code, posta code, city name, province/state name, province/state abbreviation and phone area code for the United States, Canada and Mexico.

  • Web 2.0 Style Data Visualizer – Widgenie
    By on August 12th, 2008 | No Comments Comments

    I recently received an email from an employee from a business intelligence company called LogiXML. She asked if I could write a review for LogiXML’s new SaaS (software as a service) product which is currently in beta, called ,Widgenie. I thought it would be interesting to check out something new and it was also the first time someone asked me to write a review on something since the start of this blog 20-something days ago, so it really meant a lot to me and its my honor to write this review.

        

    First thing I noticed when I looked at the site, my impression was that its a very nice web 2.0 feel website with the use very vibrant colors, clean and organized layout. Page loading was quick for me, even for the movies in the multimedia section. I sort of have an idea of the product so I quickly signed up, the process was quick as well. I received a confirmation within a minute, once my account was activated, I logged in right away to give it a test drive.

        

    The interface is extremely easy to use I am sure anyone that knows how to surf the internet can use it right off the bat. You just have to follow the steps and you can create your own widget in no time. Keep in mind though these widgets are good for display statistics by uploading your own Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets and/or CSV files. Once you have uploaded one or some of your own data files, you can create 6 different widgets such as tabular, animated line chart, animated bar chart, animated area chart, animated pie chart and text cloud widget. Hope there will be more to choose from in the future. Once you have picked a widget type, the next step is interactive drag and drop your elements from your data files into say for example, the y axis or the x axis of an animated bar chart. The program gives you control over which element goes into which field.

    Again the whole process is intuitive and I won’t go further into how to setup a widget.

    Once you are done customizing your widget, you can then publish it by choosing from the 5 given types:

  • embedding into your site directly, like I have here
  • as a simple link
  • embed into iGoogle
  • embed into Facebook
  • or embed into Blogger
  • And finally here is my test widget end product:

      

    Finally, the Widgenie also provides statistics of how many views, number of unique visitors and from what sites which is a very good addition to tracking which of your widgets people are mostly interested in.

    I’m sure I havn’t covered every aspect of Widgenie but this should give you an idea of what it is capable of, I think this program is particularly useful for people that deals with a lot of statistical data, such as number of visitors, number of site views and the time spent on the site etc. Instead of looking at boring text and numbers on an Excel spreadsheet, Widgenie will display them in a more interactive and engaging way.

    Incoming search terms:

  • Cuil – New search engine to challenge Google
    By on July 28th, 2008 | No Comments Comments

    A new search engine called Cuil was launched today (July 28th). It is developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. I quickly hopped onto the site to check it out, first thing I noticed is that it is very clean, a bit too clean assuming it just launched and had to start somewhere small first. It claims to be the biggest search engine, while I won’t doubt that will or may happen in the future, it certainly is not the biggest yet.

    On the bright side, each search will be accompanied by an image whenever possible which makes the search experience more enjoyable as opposite to just plain text results. Costello also stated that the new search engine crawls and ranks pages differently compare to Google’s flagship search engine and it heavily focuses on the “contextual” of a page. As stated from the About Cuil page “When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”.

    Onto the dark side.

    Speed-wise I don’t feel any improvement over searching through Google, some times its often slower than Google (maybe everyone is trying out this new search engine?). Many people have also reported that searches were not accurate. I tried to search for Cuil hoping to find more info about the search engine (yes I know there’s an link called About Cuil on the very first page, but correct me if I’m wrong but shouldn’t its own page get indexed as well? About one in a ten searches results in “We didn’t find any results for ” for the same keyword.

    All and all I think there is still a lot of work to be done for Cuil in order to even convince people that it is capable of searching if its claimed to be the “biggest” search engine. Right now it just doesn’t stand a chance. I will definately keep my eyes on this.