How about a little market disruption.

If websites had beards some of the longest would belong to my competitors in the event classified space. A Google search for garage sales or festivals will most undoubtedly yield a wasteland of scattered mom & pop websites and the tried and true ghost towns where you can almost see the digital tumbleweeds roll across your screen. The internet clichés have come to my market to die, in a single outing you will see everything from flashing ad banners that could be classified as health hazards to dancing bunnies frolicking against a purple home page. If there was ever a place that needed a jolt it’s this one, so this is where I decided to make my stand, among the link traders and Alexa 3,000,000’s retiring nicely to the Sunnyvale community at the far end of the web. However, Rome was not built by Romans who criticized Greek democracy, it was built by people who saw a good model and laid marble pillars on top of it in order to create something better, and that is what we are doing at NavDog. But not without a little kitsch, after all that’s what made this space an interesting place to begin with.

In its raw form Navdog.com is a visual search engine used by its visitors to find time sensitive events such as festivals, fairs, garage sales, etc… The Navdog.com service makes use of geography as a common platform that crosses multiple vertical markets in order to create a single system capable of serving customers in each market with a consistent interface. Navdog.com uses a sophisticated interactive mapping system to display events in geographic “real-space” giving the visitor a dynamic and easily controllable visual search capability.

Location, Location, Location…
Our business model incorporates the most basic yet powerful concept that focuses on the customer experience and creates exceptional value by reducing the overall time and or the amount of steps a customer will have to complete in order to access the information they wish to obtain. For example, a visitor can obtain driving directions to any event or create an event itinerary simply by choosing a reference point on the map and dropping a virtual house or starting point there, and then click any event to get directions to it. By taking traditional address information out of the process we have greatly decreased the time it takes a visitor to obtain our driving directions, we call this process “Click-&-Go”. Instead of forcing a visitor to fill out an address form or sending them to some third party website for maps and directions we provide them with a simple 2 click process designed for accuracy and convenience. Members can take this to the extreme with a drag and drop itinerary creation tool that allows them to create custom road trips that include up to 30 events and can cross state lines. With the push of a button Navdog renders the full itinerary in PDF format for perfect printing every time.

The real power of our geographic delivery system has it’s foundation in simplicity, we simply did away with addresses altogether in favor of absolute location through use of latitude and longitude. Though address fields still exist on some of our forms they are completely optional except for maybe state and zip code. We still use some geocoding and reverse geocoding in some of our processes to speed things up but where there are flaws in accuracy our members can always choose to reassign an address with its correct location on the map or create a new venue anywhere on the planet by clicking the map and assigning that spot a name. If a member desires they can choose to submit their edited, created or corrected location to our public database where other event managers can use it for their own events. This geographic customization is a concept we call “Human Edited GIS” and it removes inaccuracies found in geocoding by allowing humans to eyeball their desired location instead of being forced to live with the location the system gives them. I really have to hand it to the creators of the Virtual Earth platform; it is by far the most interactive and truly powerful mapping product out there, it’s professional grade and if you can program in it and around it anything is possible.

Create Revenue without the Clockwork Orange treatment…
Since every website has to generate revenue in order to operate the average web surfer is generally exposed to thousands of advertisements in a given week of internet exploration. The fundamental flaw in current models is evident to anyone who uses the internet, I find it amazing that ads about pet care come up when I type navdog into certain search engines and that those companies think they have done something revolutionary. I would equate this random clumsiness with the firing of a SKUD missile and it seems to yield the same result. Our targeted advertising model is quite a bit different and since our site is a giant map we are able to focus advertisements by placing them right on our map based on the sponsors’ actual geo-location. We will also require our sponsors to add value by offering our visitors something in exchange i.e. a coupon. This innovation will create a level of targeted advertisement that has never been obtained by a website before. Like all other events on our map the sponsor locations would benefit from the integrated driving directions which also serve as the printed media for their coupons and offers and this will extend their exposure beyond the boundaries of the computer screen and into the hands of people who are hitting the road. This innovative model will serve to open a valuable internet market to corporate sponsors who have never had an adequate online venue to advertise their products. These sponsors would include fast food, coffee shops, convenience store chains, and retail locations of all kinds.

Set it, Forget it, Cross your fingers and hope somebody shows up…
For our content managers which consist of event promoters and the general public, we offer an extensive set of listing options and features as well as management and marketing tools. This would also represent a first in this space, using the content freedom concept found on websites such as MySpace and eBay we allow our content managers to create totally custom map popups and details pages for their events using their own HTML. These content managers then have the ability to return to the site and update their event listings or see hit counts for their listed events. Currently we are designing a full featured control panel that will include tools such as saved venues, customer feedback, and a cool map reversal where you can see visitors’ general locations, keyword and demographic information displayed on your own private map. Most or perhaps all of our competitors have neglected to offer any feedback tools to the people who list events on their sites and this fosters a cross your fingers attitude where event promoters have to rely on intangibles like how a sites search engine presence relates to how popular it might be. Like our sponsorship model, our event listing model includes add-on features like coupons that help event managers see how many visitors the site actually brought to their event.

What can you find at Navdog?
Well you can find or list just about anything. We use the term event but that really covers more than just traditional events. You can list a business, a store or a year round market as well as anything you would consider an event.

Where we are today?
We were officially up and running in October of 2006 but we did not consider our system ready for prime time until March 30th 2007. Though we have a good working system now, it’s still changing weekly as we enhance it and upgrade some legacy elements of the site. We move pretty fast so you never know what kind of new gizmos you’re going to find each time you show up.

What does the future hold for NavDog?
We have just begun to see the scale of what lies beneath the tip of the iceberg. In the coming months and year our service will incorporate an integrated messaging system, Real-time route planning, and with a GPS enabled smart phone our system will allow you to quickly add an event to the map while you are at the event. If this isn’t enough there are numerous advances I can’t tell you anything about because of the hyper competitive nature of the business.
I would encourage anyone out there to join navdog.com and watch from the luxury of a front row seat as our system grows and our story unfolds.