WhatsOpen, a secretive local search company that promises an easier way to find which stores are open near you, is now open for public use.
Just type in the name of the store you’re looking for, and your location. Results are displayed on a Google Map mashup, with listing of stores, their hours of operation, their phone numbers and their distance from the city center appearing in a left-hand column.
I often need coffee in Mountain View, California, at odd hours of the day or night. From what I know about the city’s coffee shops’ hours of operation (a lot), the results WhatsOpen gives me are accurate. See screenshot below. In more rigorous testing, I noticed that my favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in Mountain View, Jennifer Taqueria, doesn’t show up when I look for “burritos” or “Mexican food.”
Still, the extensive open-hours information appears to give the company a leg up on its many local search competitors. Local search offerings from two of the company’s most serious rivals — Google and Yahoo — give results that include some local businesses’ hours of operation, but that is data entered manually by users. For most businesses listed in those companies’ results, nobody has entered anything.
Note: We’ve previously heard that WhatsOpen has a special relationship with Google. There’s no evidence of that at this time.
WhatsOpen also says it offers an iPhone application (which we haven’t had the chance to try yet), and it is working on an application for Google’s Android mobile software developer platform. The Android application will be GPS-enabled, WhatsOpen’s web site says, meaning results would show you more precisely how close a store is to you.
It also promises social networking applications, as a source told us last month, assumably so you can see what places are open while you’re on a social network site like Facebook or Myspace.
We’re not sure how the company plans to make money. WhatsOpen’s site says “one thing you won’t have to worry about is annoying ads or other forms of tricky advertising - we keep it simple, friendly, and genuine :)”
The feel-good tone of the company is everywhere on its site. For example, it has a manifesto-style “About” page, including a list of beliefs such as “We believe in the abundance mentality” and “We believe in a transcending culture” — though we’re not sure what these mean.
The beta is currently available in the US, China and Europe. The company is self-funded, from what we hear.
10 Comments
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Rob Scott said:
Its a bit too soon to look at this site I believe. Comparing their results with a straight Google search shows the same misses. (Coffee in Cupertino suggests Coffeetree Apartments but misses places that serve coffee but don’t have the word in their name.) The limited user editing functionality appears to be turned off as well. Maybe check again in 2 months.
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Eric Eldon said:
Rob Scott, as far as I can tell, the company does a better job of showing you “whatsopen” than its competitors. That’s useful. So I wrote about it last night, when the public beta went live.
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Ken said:
Search for Mexican Food shows all businesses that have Mexican and Food in their name. Very poor taxonomy and search. Many seach techology out there. Showing resuls in Google maps is trivial.
Amazed that such sites are getting press in Venture Beat
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Alex Moskalyuk said:
What happened to the beta? Looks like it’s closed off now, just e-mail sign up form on the front page.
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Shannon said:
it’s incorrect. i was at Pizza my Heart in palo alto last night until 2:15 am, and this site shows that they close at 6:30 pm.
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listen_to_blogs said:
How do they get the ‘hours’ data for these shops/stores???
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Rob Scott said:
There appears to be (was anyway) a mechanism whereby one could submit data; presumably vendors would submit timely updates as to their operating hours.
Eric, I agree that it is a bit better formatted than a straight Google search and I’m sure they’ll go beyond that soon enough. This is just a case where a Beta label *really* means beta. I look forward to the day when they truly show me “what’s open” as mentioned on one of their about pages…and when they start to support phones that represent significant portions of the market.
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Ronnie Somerville said:
The problem for all local search is getting the info from the small operators who have a hundred other things to think about in a working day rather than updating data for websites.
The only companies who can make this work are either global giants like Google
or/ companies with a local “monopoloy” eg a newspaper or radio station
who can offer enough to make it worthwhile for the operators not to forget to tell them that they are shut because the water pipe has burst… -
Jonathan said:
yet another company that wants to offer content without doing anything themselves. you pay for what you get.
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Dan Endy said:
I can see how this could end up being kinda cool, but based on the few comments thus far, there’s still some kinks to work out. I have to think that the only way this can be truly effective is through population/updates from the community and shopkeepers. As Ronnie points out, the latter group has so much going on already keeping their info current could be problematic. What are the site’s monetization plans?
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