Another one of the people/companies that I was introduced to at Vancouver Barcamp, Handi Mobility is exactly what the name implies: a combination of conveniently accessible content available through your cellphone. The site currently has two (public?) offerings, MyBus and Youth Talent Showdown. When I talked to Igor Faletski, he seemed more eager to talk about MyBus, so I will start there.

MyBus does a couple really good things from a company/marketing perspective; first, they have decided to try and tap into the Facebook juggernaught (am I allowed to use that on a site other than MySpace?!), and second, they offer the content/information via SMS text messaging. If you sign-up for MyBus, you can keep track of your bus schedules right on your Facebook profile. This provides a huge potential audience for the service and a chance for free advertising and promotion of the service. It could even go viral, but this is a fairly niche/targeted offering, so that might be more difficult. The bus schedule on your Facebook profile is private, and as mentioned before, is available outside of the world of Facebook. Text messaging of MyBus is facilitated through a partner of Handi Mobility, Quick Mobile. The service currently supports the cities of Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto.

The Youth Talent Search is a bit more difficult to give information about. It was a part of the 8th Annual Vancouver Chinatown festival, and voting has closed - the winner was supposed to be announced on August 12th, but there doesn’t seem to be an update on the site. From what I remember, Handi Mobility provided a way for people to vote via their cellphones, and it might be a stretch, but the talent might have even been viewable via your handheld, too, I just can’t remember. This is probably less earth shaking, nonetheless it is a great example of pushing the boundaries of interfacing with the web.

In the weeks since BarCamp Vancouver 2007 and the last nPost.com/JayAndSilentRob.com Networking Event (with a new one already announced for early October), I’ve been absolutely swamped and had a difficult time posting about the news, events, and most importantly, the people and sites that I was introduced to in the month of August.

One of those sites is Vacant Ready, a blog by Chris Clark. As is stated in the About Vacant Ready page, the term ‘vacant ready’ is a term in the hospitality industry that means a guestroom is clean and ready to sell. The blog is almost a year old, and caters to those in the hotel industry - relevant, entertaining insider hotel content in a fresh, engaging format.

Chris has done some really good things on the site to add value; you can login and become a member of the site, there is a link to his Vacant Ready Flickr photos (and the opportunity to add your own), a Google Maps page with Vancouver-area Hotels, a hospitality jobs section, and a link to UrbanDiner, home to the restaurant scene in bc.

This is a great example of a very niche-oriented blog. Although I don’t agree with using such a slender design (I can’t design a site for a screen resolution below 1024 x 768, but that might be a personal bias), there’s a good balance between the available information (which is plentiful) and having a clean design. The colour scheme even feels like a hotel, which I’m sure was planned.

For those of you interested in the hospitality/hotel Industry - especially the Vancouver scene - I definitely recommend a read on anything from the possible strikes at four Vancouver hotels to some of the local hotel rennovation projects. If you are looking at starting your own blog, especially one catering to a very specific niche/market, this is probably a good example of how to do things right (or at least mostly right).

One of the reasons we started this blog was to help prove that we really did have an understanding of what was going on and could predict or make educated guesses on what was happening, what could be happening, and what should be happening with the Internet and Internet technologies. In the last year-and-a-half, we’ve had our moments, like mentioning that YouTube was going to create a mobil platform weeks before YouTube announced it was developing a mobile platform, although I’m sure that many of these moments were not that deeply profound for others within the industry. Today, Rob forwarded me a link for an article on 10 Future Web Trends.

The article immediately establishes that we are in the midst of Web 2.0, and with that comes collaboration/aggregation, mash-ups, RSS, and online media. This is the now. The future, as it is presented, isn’t that profound. The semantic web (machines talking to machines) and artificial intelligence (AI) took the number one and two billing on the list, and I would suggest that these are no-brainers. Everyone who watched Terminator or read Asimov’s collection of short stories is familiar with these ideas, and although it can probably be stated as the inevitable reality, these types of interpretations shouldn’t be ignored.

Listed at three and four, Virtual Worlds and Mobile should again be grouped together; with more people integrating their own lives with their virtual, Internet lives, and more people adopting mobile platforms (ie. cellphones, Blackberries, and iPhones), it is only natural that development would move to tend to these desires. Virtual Worlds, however, are as old as the Internet itself, and these are merely updated versions of Ultima Online, for example, and Mobile was always limited by the technology available, not the desire to use it how we are finally able to.

It is an interesting article, and although I think it’s a good interpretation/representation of future web trends, it doesn’t really make any groundbreaking statements or predictions. At least not for those who are deeply rooted in such things - probably quite similar to my own writing, I imagine. 

We had a great response to August’s Networking Event, and one of the suggestions was to make it happen more often! Nathan (nPost.com), Rob Lewis (TechVibes), and Rob and I have put our heads together and come up with dates for the next two events: Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 & Wednesday, November 28th, 2007. Here are the details for the events:

Vancouver Entrepreneur Networking Event

Date: Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 & Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
Time: 6:00 to 8:00pm

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Startups that Will Be Attending: