Tempe: Ve vant das Googlefiber!

Tempe, at least, is aware of the potential of widespread ultrahighspeed fiber optic cable in town. Last month, the WSJ reported that Google was looking for a town to use as a test case to build out internet service with gigabyte-per-second download speed, or roughly 100 times faster than most folks currently have.

The company’s created a March 26 deadline for interested towns to apply.

Tempe’s idea, not a bad one, is to ask people to submit video ideas of what the town could do with such a service:

Tempe wants that fiber. We want it for our 175,000 residents, for our 175,000 workers, for our 4 million visitors who travel here annually for fun and business and for our 200,000 college students. Why do we want it? Tempe, Arizona is known for innovation. We think that the combined brain power of all these people, with this fiber, can change the world. We’ve already done so much.

You can help convince Google that Tempe is the best place to showcase their fiber. Tell us how you can change the world, or at least your corner of it, if you had access to the kind of speed that Google fiber promises.

That’s the spirit. PHXated would move to Tempe overnight if it pulled that off. But if it wants it it’s going to have to deal with Topeka first.

Yelp's coming to town—big time!

The online city guide Yelp is moving into the Valley, saying it will be employing as many as 200 people, the PBJ reports:

The center will employ sales agents and account managers.

CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the Scottsdale office will be Yelp’s third to go along with its San Francisco base and an office in Manhattan.

The Phoenix Yelp site is here.

Yelp has its uses, and it also has its detractors: A story from last year from the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly in Berkeley, detailed some of the outfit’s dicey leveraging of its reviews and its advertising. It began this way:

The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”

The story had a half-dozen local businesspeople testifying to calls like that—and the unconfirmable but nagging sense that negative reviews of their places of business cropped up high on their Yelp page just before the sales folks started calling.

The Express story got criticized by Yelp, mostly for the fact that all of the people quoted in it didn’t want their names used.

The reporter, Kathleen Richards, defended the practice, noting that the businesspeople understandably didn’t want to get on Yelp’s bad side.

… but just to make the point, she turned around and wrote an even longer piece, this one with a slew of on-the-record complaints about the same practices or worse. That story’s here.

Google ultrahighspeed internets! Something Phoenix should be bidding on

Breaking news, from the Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. plans to build and test broadband networks than could deliver speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans use.
[…]
The Internet giant, which plans to offer the service to at least 50,000 customers and potentially up to 500,000, said it aims to foster the development of new “killer apps” as well as experiment with new ways to deploy fiber networks.

Key graf:

The company is collecting responses from interested communities until March 26 and will reveal the ones it has selected later this year.

Kicking the EVT while it's down, continued

Granted it’s a holiday, and granted there’s an enormous amount of pressure on the folks inside the East Valley Tribune—they don’t know, week to week, if they’re gong to have jobs.

But here again is the main feature well of the paper this a.m.:

I’m assuming the web site has something programmed into it to generate the feature well by taking the top stories from two different departments. But as we saw last week and again today, it’s maybe not smart to let the front page of a web site be created without human intervention.

You hate to kick the EVT while it's down ...

.. and granted, it’s New Year’s weekend. Still, here’s the front-and-center well of its front page this a.m.:

p.s.: Heat City is reporting that the paper’s editor, Chris Coppola, is leaving—for an editing job at the Arizona Republic.

Another example of how AZCentral.com sucks

“Hey kids! Let’s go to Lake Pleasant! We’ve never been there before. Tommy—why don’t you look up the best route on the internets!”

“Great, Dad! I’ll look it up on AZCentral dot com! Why, with just a few clicks, we can get a map that shows us exactly where it is!”

“Terrific, son! What are you finding out?”

“It was simple, pops! Here we go!”

“Um, that looks a little weird, son. Why is it in Morristown? And where in the hell is Morristown?”

“Oh, Dad, you just don’t understand the web! AZCentral dot com has great maps you can manipulate to find out exactly where we’re going! Let me pull the map out a bit. It has to be right—it’s AZCentral dot com, ’Arizona’s home page’! Gimme a sec, Dad. Click … click … and—voila!”

“Um, Son, isn’t that Lake Pleasant way over there to the right, 60 miles away from the red arrow?”

[The child’s lower lip begins to tremble] “You mean, AZCentral dot com wasn’t right?”

[Hastily] Wait, Tommy, I can get us there. Just click on the phrase ‘Lake Pleasant Regional Park,’ though, so we can find out if we can fish."

“Daaaaaad!”:

[Child bursts into tears] “There’s nothing there!”

[Sorrowfully] "I’m afraid not, son. [Sigh] I thought it might be a few more years before we had this discussion, but we might as well have it now.

“Let me tell you what happened. You’d think that, with many decades of publishing in the state, the Arizona Republic would have an unparalleled storehouse of information about things to do in the area, including recreational activities. That would all be very useful to visitors to the paper’s web site, AZCentral dot com.

“But that would take a genuine care about serving readers. Papers like the Republic got out of the habit of thinking like that decades ago. In the internet age, it’s a lot easier to just put banners on the site about all the things to do in town, without actually providing the information folks might need to do any of it.

“The result? A supposedly local web site that can’t keep track of a goddamn lake fifteen- or twenty-square miles in size. You can see that no one at the paper ever looks at the results. It doesn’t even tell us if there’s a marina, if we can fish or swim, or what. There’s virtually no information at all, and the one bit of information it does have, the address, is incorrect.

“You see, son, this is why the daily press in America is in trouble. For decades they made millions with their local monopolies. Now, they have to be on the web, but their thoroughgoing timidity, internal lassitude and penny-pinching ways means they are singularly ill-equipped to compete in these new paradigms. Not to mention—”

“Uh, Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“I’m bored. You always get a little wound up when we talk about stuff like that.”

[deep breath] “You’re right, son. Next time we’ll just use a good old-fashioned paper map.”

[smiles] “Aww, Dad!”

[Exeunt, pursued by a bear]

[Curtain]