Local Search Done Right: iBegin Source
iBegin source does local search, sure. If I look for laundry service in East Elmhurst I get a veritable list of results, including, in #1 position, the actual location of the nearest laundromat:
That’s enough to convince me that iBegin’s data is high-quality, since it’s the actual data-selling from which they want to make money. Their edge is selling clean, structured, and updated business-information data. You can browse it all online, so you know exactly what you’re getting. For $1000 a state, or $40000 for all the US, they’ll sell you 10,820,477 unique business listings, enriched by:
- Deduplication, sorting, and filtering
- Geocoding and nearest intersection
- Automatic purchasing
- Free daily, weekly, and monthly updates
- Simple delimited data format
If you were looking to start a web business with this kind of data, iBegin source would be a great place to start. They have a unique edge on others in this market because their data is social data. Anyone viewing an entry can also update it, adding value to the content for all other users:
This might be the first commercial wikipedia-like editing system I’ve seen that could succeed, because everyone wins when the data is updated. Customers who submit a listing or automate posting new items increase their own database, iBegin’s database, and thanks to free updates, help out the entire community.
I read 15 things iBegin Source does better on a blog the other day so I was pleasantly surprised when this showed up on ReviewMe, because it’s an interesting idea. Anything build around sharing data cheaply (well, for that market anyway) is a great idea.