When You Need to Know: What’s Open?
January 2nd, 2008 — Dan Endy
Here’s a pretty neat “local” website (in Beta) that I can see providing a great service for local consumers some day. While I have to admit that I like the concept of the site, I mostly like the catchiness of the site’s name: WhatsOpen.com (punctuation error notwithstanding).
In fact, just yesterday I was asking myself this very question. I had to help my inlaws out by buying them a new computer at 4:30 in the afternoon–on New Year’s Day–and with three major electronics retailers close by, I wanted/needed to know what’s open? In my case all three are geographically close, so it wasn’t too big a deal, but had they been in three different directions maybe a quick mobile search on What’sOpen.com, could have helped determine which direction to point the car! (By the way, for those of you following along, I used ancient technology i.e., the telephone to call the stores, for my answer).
WhatsOpen has been covered quite a bit lately by VentureBeat, which was where I came across it. From what I can tell, they’re self funded and seem to have a cozy relationship with Google (which is pretty good company to have in this case). According to Venture Beat: “It [WhatsOpen] will let users search reviews from Facebook and other social networks that provide open access to their users via Google’s OpenSocial developer platform, a source tells us…
“There are many local search companies and mobile search companies that have already launched publicly. Whatsopen is the first company we’ve heard of that is trying to tie them all together, although right now its not clear exactly how.”
Some of the comments on VentureBeat’s coverage seem to indicate that right now the site’s search results are spotty at best. Also, there’s very little that I can tell with regard to advertising or monetization opportunities. WhatsOpen’s own site has this little caveat: “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 :)”
I can’t imagine that there won’t be any ads on the site any more than I can imagine that it’ll be funded by all of the mom and pop shops who choose to populate content when it’s such a natural fit for geo-targeted delivery…It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of their Beta.
