Webware

Google Maps and Google Earth are the centerpiece of NYCGo, a new information and reference project launched by the New York City government to provide resources to both visitors and locals. Wednesday's launch announced the debut of NYCGo.com, a Google Maps-fueled local search and reference site, as well as the unveiling of the renovated New York City Information Center a few blocks north of the tourist-heavy Times Square district.

NYCGo.com contains not just Google map and search data, but also travel deals from Travelocity and local content from what-to-do powerhouse Time Out New York, nightlife culture magazine Paper, the New York Observer, and eco-living guide Greenopia.

The information center, located on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets, is equally Googly. The city's technocratic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, even contributed a guest post to the official Google blog to announce it: "The Information Center features interactive map tables, powered by the Google Maps API for Flash, that let you navigate venues and attractions as well as create personalized itineraries, which can be printed, emailed or sent to mobile devices," the blog post explained. "Additionally, there's a gigantic video wall that utilizes Google Earth to display a 3D model of New York City on which you can map out personalized itineraries."

Bloomberg has been aggressive about promoting tech initiatives during his time in office, from a wind power plan (part of the much bigger "GreeNYC" project) and a city-run venture firm. Under his watch, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google opened its New York satellite office, taking over several floors of the historic former Port Authority building downtown.

A side note: the video provided by Google shows the "interactive map tables" in the new information center, and they look a whole lot like Microsoft Surface units. But they aren't, a representative from NYCGo tells us. They're custom-made.

A look at the iGoogle Artist Theme created by Brazilian label Havaianas.

(Credit: Google)

Many a couture designer might frown on Google's trademark primary colors (what do they say about putting yellow next to red again?), but that doesn't mean that Mountain View doesn't have some fashion sense. To commemorate this month's New York Fashion Week in midtown Manhattan, Google has introduced a new set of themes for its iGoogle personal homepage service, created by some of the biggest names in high style.

The 19 designers and labels included in the special edition of iGoogle Artist Themes (a project originally launched in May) include Gucci, Betsey Johnson, Vivienne Tam, Kate Spade, Burberry, and my personal favorite--funky Brazilian flip-flop line Havaianas. Several other fashion labels, like Diane von Furstenberg and Marc Ecko, were already on iGoogle as part of the original Artist Themes launch.

Google also launched nine more themes created by musicians, including Bob Dylan, Gnarls Barkley, and Radiohead, the pioneering British act that already has a big following from the Googleplex.

The debut of iGoogle's fashion themes, to take place Wednesday through Friday at New York Fashion Week's headquarters, will be lower-key than the glitzy affair in May that splashed colorful projections all over the cobblestone streets of the downtown Meatpacking District.

But having a presence at Fashion Week is a savvy move for Google, regardless of how many iGoogle users want to put Jimmy Choo on their personal homepages, as the biannual sartorial confab isn't just a big deal for the fashion business. It's also a big occasion for Google's dance partner of choice in New York--the ad industry.

This post was updated at 7:58 a.m. PT.

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who left the Yahoo-acquired company in June, has a new gig. She posted on her blog on Wednesday that she'll be joining a stealthy New York-based start-up, Hunch, as "Chief Product Officer, board member, and resident Facebook app skeptic."

So what is Hunch? That's under the radar, but we're hearing from a well-placed source that it's a recommendation engine that uses "collective crowd intelligence." That doesn't sound too original, but our source hinted that the technology behind it is pretty top-notch. It's still under development, but when Hunch is finished, it will presumably be able to provide recommendations on just about anything or everything. (Hence the name "Hunch.")

What Fake did say: that she won't be relocating to New York, but will spend a lot of time there; that her husband and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield isn't involved; that Hunch invites will start to go out in the fall; and that she still doesn't find much time to sleep.

Looks like we were right: PaidContent reported Thursday that restaurant and take-out menu listing site MenuPages has been acquired. The buyer, they say, is New York magazine.

No financial details were provided.

We reported back in May that MenuPages had been acquired, but didn't have any hints as to a buyer. We speculated that it was possibly Yelp or IAC's Citysearch. With New York as a buyer, it's likely that MenuPages will stay locally rooted rather than continuing to expand nationally: there are editions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., but the buyer is wholly Gotham-centric. There's no word as to what will happen to the non-New York editions of the site.

New York magazine, which runs an extensive network of local blogs, is owned by private equity firm Wasserstein & Co., and restaurant listings are a prominent feature on its Web site.

A helpful search for my favorite hard-to-find brew.

(Credit: BeerMenus)

BeerMenus.com, I've been dreaming about you at night. And now you've jumped into my world. We're a match made in heaven.

Here's how it works. Much like a boozier version of Menupages, BeerMenus aggregates bars' beer lineups so that you can search for a particular establishment or for a particular beer to find out where it's on tap (or bottled) and for how much. For those of us who prefer their beer to be a bit more esoteric than Bud Lite or even Stella Artois, this is a godsend. I searched for my favorite variety, Allagash White (a delightful Belgian-style white ale brewed in Portland, Maine), and BeerMenus gave me a list of ten establishments where I could find it along with a Google Maps mashup.

For even more hops-and-barley fun, BeerMenus indexes special events at bars as well. That's something that Going, Upcoming, Yelp, and their socially prolific brethren already handle, but it's still a nice feature.

The nifty little site, which just launched Thursday, currently only extends to New York's prolific bar scene, and within that, it still only has about 150 Manhattan bars' menus available. And unfortunately, at the moment I'm across the country in San Francisco so I can't actually do a field test. I'm guessing it's generally accurate, but beer menus do tend to shift around more frequently than food menus do--that's an area where social-networking features like comments and reviews could help.

But really. Think about what could happen if this expanded: frequent travelers could learn where to find their favorite brews in unfamiliar cities, or learn where they can try out a nice pint of a regional favorite. The site also has plenty of room for recommendations, discovery features, and reviews--like a Snooth for beer.

You'd never have to drink a crappy beer again.

Yelp, the business reviews site that has gained a loyal following of opinionated young urbanites, as well as a couple of haters, announced on Wednesday that it has raked in a fresh $15 million in venture dough. The funding round, which closed Tuesday, comes from new investor DAG Ventures, as well as a number of existing investors.

Representatives of Yelp, which earns money through advertising revenue and sponsored listings, and has some much larger competitors, such as InterActiveCorp's Citysearch, say the current tally of reviews posted on the site is 2.3 million. Traffic is steadily climbing.

Google Analytics places Yelp's October 2007 traffic at 5 million unique visitors, then 6 million in December and 7 million in January 2008. Traffic for February, according to the same metrics, is set to pass 8 million.

Server space to handle higher traffic isn't Yelp's only reason for needing new funding: the company is opening an office in downtown New York, the company's first outside San Francisco. The new digs, in the West Village neighborhood, will open on March 3. And Manhattan real estate ain't cheap, especially in that part of town.

You can't really keep anything a secret in the New York media industry, but Google managed to do a pretty good job of it on Wednesday night.

The Mountain View megalith rented out the Terminal 5 uberclub on the West Side for an event it called "Videocracy," which is Google-ese for "Hey, advertisers, this is why you should cozy up to YouTube." The company also reportedly made a number of hints at the video site's direction, talking about some in-the-works features.

It was a strictly no-press event; Silicon Alley Insider reporter Michael Learmonth weaseled his way into the open-bar party, only to be given the boot moments later. (I unfortunately didn't try to sneak in. I was downtown, where TheStreet.com was celebrating the launch of its new Mainstreet site. Jim Cramer is shorter than I expected he'd be.)

But secret spies tell CNET News.com that not only were YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen there, so were a number of the site's biggest stars, like "Chocolate Rain" singer Tay Zonday and fashionisto William Sledd.

And Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer wrote a brief recap of the event on his personal blog, detailing some of the upgrades that are in development at YouTube.

According to Schafer, the site will soon be launching video recommendations based on prior viewing history; think StumbleUpon or Amazon Recommendations. Also mentioned were "active sharing," a beta feature that displays which users have recently watched a video (consider it the YouTube equivalent of Facebook's social ads), improvements to YouTube's video-editing tools, and the expansion of YouTube's content to platforms beyond the PC.

"Steve Chen is excited about content on really, really big TVs," Schafer wrote.

NEW YORK--Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.

A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan's upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007's "Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards," a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.

Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and interviews, with plenty of talk of monetization and ROI and user engagement and the attention economy and just about every other ad-industry cliche you've ever heard of (as well as some you haven't), it was quite refreshing to watch a bunch of YouTube videos representing ad campaigns that actually worked. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

Among the winners were winners of user-generated ad contests like Frito Lay's "Crash the Super Bowl" competition; faux-amateur clips like Ray-Ban's "Never Hide" ad; too-edgy-for-TV spots like one of Unilever's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads; and naturally, "Will It Blend?" The YouTube video series from blender manufacturer BlendTec had been created without the help of an extrenal agency, and had already built up quite a fan base when it published the notorious "iPhone in a blender" video.

The full list is here. But what I'd like to know is, for every one of these runaway hits, how many equally creative Web video ad campaigns flop? I'm still a believer in randomness on the Web. But then again, I can't see any way that a guy putting an iPhone into a blender and hitting the "smoothie" button couldn't have been a huge hit.

NEW YORK--Standing in the front of a room packed full of corporate executives, journalists, and representatives from Madison Avenue's biggest advertising companies, on Tuesday afternoon Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg formally announced the social-networking site's new advertising initiative, an ambitious program deeply rooted in viral trends and "trusted referrals."

Called Facebook Ads, the new program is threefold: advertisers can create branded pages, run targeted advertisements, and have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site's more than 50 million users. Partners can participate in all three components of Facebook Ads, or a combination of them. "When you put this all together, you get some pretty amazing things," Zuckerberg said of the program, which he said took "four months or so" to develop.

Through the branded pages program, advertisers can design custom pages with information, content, and custom applications--"any application that was written for users on the Facebook Platform," Zuckerberg explained. Facebook users can sign up as "fans" of that brand, install branded applications, and other activities that will all show up in their profiles' "mini feeds" and on the "news feeds" that are broadcast to their friends lists.

"When people engage your page on Facebook, that's going to spread information about your brand virally through the social graph," Zuckerberg said. "It becomes a trusted referral."

And with a "Beacon" application, this can connect to advertisers' external homepages, which Zuckerberg demonstrated by pretending to sell a pair of Adidas sandals (his trademark, which he had notably forsaken for a pair of closed-toed shoes during Tuesday's announcement) on eBay; a Facebook window popped up and asked if he wanted to share news of the sale on his Facebook profile.

Additionally, Facebook has unveiled targeted advertisements that will allow marketers to target by any information inside Facebook profiles, from relationship status to favorite television shows. Zuckerberg demonstrated the interface by targeting a hypothetical running shoe ad toward women aged 18 to 30 in New York who have listed "running" among their interests.

"With this interface, you'll be able to target exactly the people that you want," Zuckerberg said. "This is some really powerful stuff, and nothing like this has ever been seen before."

Finally, Zuckerberg showed how Facebook Ads will also give advertisers access to tracking and analytics information about exactly who they're reaching and what kind of trends are appearing all over the site. "As you run ads on Facebook, you'll be able to see the exact mindshare that your brand is getting."

He assured the audience that this will not compromise members' personal privacy in any way. "No direct personally identifiable information is ever shared back with marketers," he explained.

Facebook Ads, which officially launch Tuesday night, will be accessible through the company's sales team as well as through an online "self-service assistant." Launch partners, which had been rumored to be limited to a select nine or ten, include The New York Times Co., Blockbuster, CondeNet, General Motors, STA Travel, Fandango, CollegeHumor, Joost, Six Apart, Coke, Sony BMG, Verizon, and several dozen others.

The unveiling of Facebook's advertising program was hotly anticipated, with rumors flying around for weeks about exactly how the fast-growing company would tackle the tough issue of how to advertise on a social network--where people go to "poke" their friends, not search for new products to buy.

But last month, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a $240 million stake in Facebook, valuing the young company at $15 billion, with the intention of expanding its existing advertising partnership. Then, Facebook saw some of its thunder stolen last week, when Google revealed its OpenSocial initiative largely to counteract Facebook's momentum, and rival MySpace.com announced a targeted advertising initiative of its own.

But that wouldn't dampen Zuckerberg's enthusiasm. In his well-rehearsed keynote address, reminiscent of Steve Jobs' legendary Apple product unveilings, the 23-year-old CEO explained that "we are in a time in history where more information is available and people are more connected than they have ever been before."

He repeatedly described Facebook Ads as a revolution in marketing. In the last century, he explained, the cost of communication was vastly higher than it is now, and media channels were only available on a macro level. "In the next hundred years, information isn't just going to be pushed out to people. It's going to be shared across the billions of connections that people already have," Zuckerberg said. "Pushing out your message isn't enough anymore."