The Great Bagel War

[Don’t delete/move on just yet, there are a few interesting things related to start-ups/venture capital in here]

As you may know we at JLA have two offices; our world HQ in Toronto and an embassy in Montreal.  We also have an office I maintain in Air Canada Airbus 320s. Unfortunately, the misguided souls in Montreal have only ever been exposed to a thing called a “Montreal Style” bagel.  Naturally, this kid from the east coast (aka NY) is on a mission to help educate my partners on real bagels. 

I’m going to be in Boston on Sunday doing some code review/practice on a possible investment and will either zip down to NY and pick up H&H bagels or grab some from Rosenfeld’s in Newton Center, MA.  We have a 9:30a team meeting on Monday with the Montreal contingent as well as our partners from RBC. This will be a perfect time to education the group on what a proper bagel looks, feels, and tastes like.  6a out of NY (or Boston) and we’ve got hot Bagels at 9:30a in Toronto. I love my Air Pass.

The bagel war got me thinking about opportunities beyond just the obvious: Type “best bagels in Boston” or “best bagels in NYC”, into Google, read through reviews on Yelp, Chow, etc, go with the preponderance of the evidence and that’s it.

Imagine you land in Boston (or NY) and you want ‘the best bagel’.  All you have is your Blackberry (or Apple thingamajig).  You can use the browser and do what I suggested above, or scroll through various sites, etc, but on that little box, it’s a pain.  There has to be an opportunity in here, right?

First, there is your own social network. You can do the ‘going to new york’ routine and let see if you get any responses.  I’m betting that somebody reading this will tell me how good (or not) Roesenfeld Bagels are.  Or I could, tonight, put this bagel thing as my status on Facebook, post a bagel question on LinkedIn (and probably get thrown off), etc, but it’s not the way the masses think. We are spontaneous. We start jonesing for that bagel and we want it now. Yes, you could hit Twitter with this as soon as you start to twitch with a bagel need.

Second, there are tons of review sites. As I mentioned, Yelp, Chow, Judys book, ZipLocal, etc.  The problem is that I’m not going to scan em all during my Bagel fix requirement especially on that small screen. Sure, I’ll get the GPS to point me to Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts but that’s about the limit.

There are scary sites that tell you more than you ever want to know. Absolute Bagels in NY? They make them the old fashion/correct way: Boil em.  They are historic and lots of big shot experts on authentic bagels always point you to Absolute.  Unfortunately, the city of New York and Absolute Bagels have a difference of opinion when it comes to inspections.  Mice and Personal cleanliness seem to be of concern.

So, tons of information out there.  I believe getting all of this data to you and I when we need it most, etc, remains elusive. The challenge is harnessing all this computing power we collectively have to take my request and crunch all of the data, real time, with an answer. 

The problems here are big.  Yelp and crew will barf if they are being screen scraped for somebody else’s application. Even if you could figure out a way past that, next up would be parsing the ratings, blending them, adding fun stuff like who had rats roaming the hallways, and then getting it to you. Plus add some extras like where you are, what time it is, etc.  Maybe I’m not near place A which is the best but I’m around the corner from place B which also got great ratings, etc.

All of these issues also cries out for standards galore.  A standard way for addresses to be put ‘out there’ with geo-codes.  A “real people” system where you and I could sign up and universally be validated as a real person regardless of what site we want to interact. Plus our reviews are ours which could be used in other places.  Microsoft tried this with a project called Hailstorm. A more apropos code name you couldn’t find after watching the hailstorm of criticism dumped on the company.  There other open ID things happening but we aren’t there yet.

The best bagel thing is laughable as a specific problem to solve, I agree, but the larger infrastructure problems, the bigger ways to mash data and present it, certainly are problems worth solving.

So, anybody been to Rosenfeld’s recently?

Comments

[Jerry]

Hi Rick,

This is the exact problem we are solving -- http://collectivesys.com

Jerry
Founder, CollectiveSys.com

[David Dufresne]

"Boil em." hahahahahahahahaha. Classic.
The real War is between Fairmount and St-Viateur

The Praized guys will argue that they are working exactly on what you describe. http://praized.com/merchants/search?q=bagels&l=&r=
Haven't seen the iPhone app yet.

[Thomas Purves]

Ha. I had this same problem but it was phrased as the google query "best mexican brunch in san fran".

Which, incidentally, was found to be this place (yum): http://flickr.com/photos/thomaspurves/2342805813/in/set-72157594539259442/

[Sylvain Carle]

"Or I could, tonight, put this bagel thing as my status on Facebook, post a bagel question on LinkedIn (and probably get thrown off), etc, but it’s not the way the masses think. We are spontaneous. We start jonesing for that bagel and we want it now. Yes, you could hit Twitter with this as soon as you start to twitch with a bagel need."

Wow. You have perfectly described Praized Answers!

I just asked the question, it was sent to my (considerable) network on Twitter (@afrognthevalley), Facebook, identi.ca and FriendFeed.

Check out the answers here
http://praized.com/questions/place-great-bagel-boston
it usually takes about 15-30 minutes to get good answers from people you trust.

Or iPhone App (should be) released in early February on the iTune Store and on Google code (it will be open source, Apache 2 license like most of our client librairies for our API).

If anyone is interested to beta test our app you can send me your UDID (see http://blogs.praized.com/dev/find-your-iphone-udid/ to learn how)

[/shameless-plug]

[Martin Edic (Techrigy)]

Actually Rick, SM2 collects Yelp. You can use social media monitoring to source your bagel fix including geo-targeting. You can judge the authority of the opinions, tracks sources by really pissed off or really sweet (actually the tone measurements are Very Positive/Very Negative), get updates in real time letting you know if a snowstorm has closed the bagel bakery via Twitter, etc. etc.
Now will you fund us? ;-)

[Joe]

If I were a mouse I would go to Absolute Bagels too. They rock.

[Harrison Lung]

For what it's worth, I find that I use CitySearch and MenuPages moreso than the sites you listed. To me, they seem to have more/better user feedback, especially for NYC.

[Paul Dawalibi]

Rick,

You have perfectly articulated the problem that Praized is already solving. You should check out the Praized Answers service and stay tuned for some pretty exciting ways Praized is going to transform the "local" landscape.

[Leo Lax]

While I remain an avid St Viateur bagel fan, it amazes me that we, in the Capital (the Canadian Capital), have been ignored (again!). The real quality bagel comes from Ottawa, the Ottawa Bagel Shop on Wellington. Had I read this earlier I would have sent a dozen to the meeting to give you all a real treat!

[kashif]

Not an easy problem to solve, but a very good idea.

I have a similar problem where lets say I'm driving somewhere and I want to eat some pizza. I put 'pizza' in my GPS and it gives me a huge-list of pizza stores near me. Well thank you, but I'd rather have a list ordered by:

- most popular pizzeria
- review/score
- distance

Sure if I had a GPS device with yelp integration, it would give me POIs with reviews. But yelp itself isn't that great when it comes to reviews - reviews only become meaningful when you have a couple of them for say a restaurant and are relatively recent.

I think what you need to really do is make reviewing places more accessible. For instance a wonderful iPhone app that actually made it easy create reviews for retail stores by say looking at your current GPS coordinates and guessing what store you want to review about.