(As evidence of the fact that I don’t post — or visit — here much, I didn’t realize that this draft never got published. Oops. Here it is a few weeks late.)
Introducing Lozzal.com, the product of over a year’s hard work developing a service for a new online local business niche. Go explore some ideas for things to see and do right now then come back for the conception story.
The back story:
In late 2008 the team and I at We-Create Inc asked ourselves “If we want to play in the online local business services space then we need something really different. Is there something that we can build that hasn’t been done before and complements all of the existing services that are already out there?” A TALL order to be sure, but the answer we came up with was the concept of a local discovery engine.
In short, local search services have been done to death. That particular game is won mostly because the business listing providers don’t want to share their data with people who are trying to steal their lunch. Moreover, in-car GPS devices, and more recently mobile phones, have opened up to people the notion of searching or browsing by proximity. But again, that’s been done to death.
We brainstormed for days and in the end someone said “Local search is great if you know what you want, but what if you don’t? Can we help those people?” Inspiration.
An idea was born, our creative juices were flowing and the concept was very, very simple. Say for example that you’re bored, stuck in a rut and want to try something new. Typing “I’m bored” into Google is surely going to entertain you for a while, but probably not in the ways you’d expect. A service that would consider everything that is going on around you from live music to the weather is bound to be able to offer up a few ideas. Right? How hard could it be?
That’s what we set out to determine. We had no idea how to build such a service or if anyone would want to use it. However, as we discussed and refined it with other employees at We-Create, with our friends and with our families it seemed that this was exactly what they’d always been wanting. Most of them were tired of hopping from site to site looking for local information and wanted something that was nicely summarized in one place. Sure, we’d be adding yet another site to the mix, but if done right it could be the first stop from now on for bazillions of people (optimistic eh?).
That said we were also somewhat leery. We’d already tried to “bring it all together” once before with ConnectorLocal.com, and while it saw moderate success (and still does), there was little to differentiate it from other “local aggregation sites”. The benefit of that effort was that we were well versed in geo-data concepts from mapping to geocoding and with the math involved for computations of distance, containment, intersection and proximity of 3 or more points. We had all the tools we thought we needed. Now we just had to build it.
We wanted to include everything we could think of in deciding what to suggest. The weather mattered because dinner on the patio in the rain isn’t fun. The sunrise/sunset mattered because we didn’t want to suggest kids play in the park after dark or a person go stargazing at noon. Proximity mattered because driving 50km to get dinner isn’t probably what our users wanted. You get the idea. There are at least a dozen more factors that go (or could go) into the algorithm we developed that makes the Lozzal suggestions you see when you play with it. Some I could talk about, others I can’t.
I’ll spare you the gory details of the intervening year and a half. Multiple re-starts, idea bloat and feasibility shrinkage. Focus groups, partner negotiations, funding discussions and long debates were all part of the mix. In the end all I can say is that the team has pulled it off marvelously. Jeffrey Sambells (@iamamused), Victor Sumner (@scarletjester), Rob Drimmie (@rmdrimmie) and David Janik-Jones (@daveyjj) all deserve credit for providing the bulk of the blood, sweat and tears. Other members of our engineering team certainly helped out too, so thanks to everyone else as well. Also thanks to the management team for believing in the idea and being willing to gamble with us that it was a sound and valuable service to pursue.
Now that it’s launched, what’s next? Well what you see today is just the first cut. We’ve got hundreds more ideas either on paper or already partly implemented in code. Lozzal is our baby and we’re going to try to help it grow up to be the best gosh-darn local tool you’ve ever seen. I sense more long debates in our future 
.
So, assuming you’re still reading this and you haven’t already run off to play with Lozzal.com, what are you waiting for? Go try it on the web or on your phone. We’d love to get your feedback.
Oh! And if you find yourself someplace strange and wonderful having the time of your life, please do let us know that our hard work has helped you in some way. You can tweet us at @LozzalApp and we’ll chat about the experience.
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