| AskSudd mission is to build community portal for use by people of real neighborhood communities. What problems our community portal solve? To start with, we call AskSudd a community portal because it is useful in transporting people between real and virtual space where they can interact with their neighborhood communities. The Virtual space is made up of technologies like Computers, Disk drives, programming languages and standards of internet communication network. The Real space made up of land, roads, automobile, brick and mortar is where people physically connect with their neighborhood communities. Since 1997, increasing number of people utilize both real and virtual space to gain productivity for themselves and their community. Most importantly, both ways of connection to their neighborhood communities is an interactive experience. The inter-activity on virtual space by people is new and evolving in terms of usefulness and user experience. This effort by EyeConect Portal Services Inc. is to create, organize and present real neighborhood information on virtual space forming closer link between real and virtual space for use by our audience. Why do we need community portals? There are some obvious and some not so obvious reasons. Here is one not so obvious reason, it is a fact that web technologies are progressing with great speed allowing each of us to help ourselves to immense knowledge stored on networked computing platform like the internet. Use of technology by majority of users on the net beyond email programs like yahoo mail, or hotmail is quite dismal. Even though forums, calender programs, Blogs, photo sharing do exist. The reality is that only fraction of us are able to comprehend web 2.0 (mash up) and web 3.0 (personalized mash up) technologies and take advantage of them. The knowledge gap is getting wider between the people who can use the new technologies and people who can not. Hence, only the "tech savvy" of our society are keeping up. Neighborhood businesses are busy making business decision on marketing, inventory, pricing etc. this makes it not so easy to learn and use new information tools. Services of neighborhood community portals like AskSudd offer a way to build bridges to close the gap between the folks who create technology for mass consumption and people who can benefit from its use and make their life a bit less hectic. Community portals have the potential of facilitating small business and household productivity to the extent large corporations have experienced using the same technology. Problems of virtual representation of real neighborhood communities stem from the fact that it takes localized organization motivated to keeping information updated and accurate all the time. Incomplete representation of real neighborhood is valuable to it's audience only some of the time. How do we derive real value from this portal for our audience at all times? Currently, large local sites(yahoo local, yelp, google local, ask city, city search etc.) are centralized organization who never set foot in the neighborhood they provide information about hence can only provide business directory and anonymous reviews of those businesses using web2.0 mash ups. Some local businesses (realtors) and local organizations (for profit and not for profit) provide local informational sites which can only be found by use of major search engines. Others are smaller neighborhood sites (Topanga Online) on the net but content is dependent on volunteers and paid advertisements. Also portal sites which offer platforms (neighborhoodlink.com )to build neighborhood sites but have not been able to organize business model which can sustain growth with quality of service. Newest player for local information comes in the model of "citizen journalism" type sites. These are still incomplete, island of information, and in some cases poorly maintained sites. The search engine technology has yet to build us a complete neighborhood portal we are searching from. The nature of this problem is such that it requires "feet on the street" organization to keep up with real changes in our neighborhood. Achieving real time virtual representation of real neighborhood has value for its audience, local businesses and portal builders.
Solution is to organize employees with stake in the neighborhood they cover, create profit-loss center for group of neighborhoods and manage neighborhood content which is all inclusive. AskSudd has organized contractors , we call CONNECTORS, to cover the neighborhoods of West San Fernando Valley. Connectors are deployed like stringers responsible for adding to the content collection, compensated for accurate and timely reporting of events in the neighborhood. Connectors also assist local merchants to set up their publicity campaign on the site. Presentation of the information will be mash-up of our collected information with Mapping API's,Calender API's, Blog RSS, search results etc. , also allowing our audience to review, comment and connect (IM, chat, forums). This hands on approach to build and maintain neighborhood information base is crucial to gain audience loyalty. Value of this site will be derived from our presentation of neighborhood information that can be relied upon to save the audience time and money. Using social networking tools will allow connection to the real neighborhood on all types of browsing capable platforms ( desktop or mobile). AskSudd will place itself at the center of local inter-activity where merchants can deal with their customers and community participation will become easier. Basis for the value is the collection of content in our database. Here is list of some of the content, locations of public parking spaces, scores in the local parks from last night's games,local park activities, scheduled meet-up, local news, civil notices, local art etc. etc. Sustainability of this site in terms of revenue will come from marketing service to local merchants, membership service, web services, loyalty programs. - Audience will experience an engaged site to discover their neighborhood for business, chores and for pleasure. They will be able to post messages, stories, events and share their knowledge with the community. Their feedback will drive content development. Membership service will be available for high quality on-demand web services which are under development.
- Local Merchants will now have another way to market their product and services. AskSudd will become low cost and highly targeted neighborhood market messenger. We are organized to provide complete marketing service for local merchants to local and world wide audience. To start with, we have published our AD Rate scheme. The AD rate scheme is based on zone and slot based rate structure. Zone of the advertiser business location relative to the slot on the neighborhood page where they would like to place their AD copy. They need zero knowledge of web services to take advantage of our AD placement services. We will guarantee ROI 50% better than Yellow Pages or Print Ad. Web services are under development for various vertical markets which will increase their on-line business with pay as you go based fee structure.
AskSudd is a Service of EyeConect Portal Services Inc. which was incorporated in California 2004. Where is askSudd now? As you can see, we are on our way to create a virtual space full of real content from the neighborhoods of West San Fernando Valley in the city of Los Angels, California. There are about 25 neighborhoods in this district comprising of 11 sq. miles and population of approximately 800,000 (see Census Report). We are collecting many real business cards to populate our neighborhood search engine database, produce witness program to record gas price in the neighborhood, sales events, civic events. We also have very good idea how much and where local businesses are spending their marketing budget to reach customers. We are ready to bridge the gap between real and the internet media to expand our neighborhood marketplace. Marketing program to connect local merchants with their potential client has begun. When collecting business cards, we are engaging the business owner in conversation to discover services useful for their business and making them aware of our current service. To build traffic to our site we are using guerrilla style marketing on the streets of San Fernando Valley in conjunction with Search Engine Optimization of our site. Growth of our portal model to many more neighborhoods is to be accomplished through franchise licensing service. United States of America has work force with over 50 years experience in managing franchise operations (McDonalds, UPS store, Century21 etc.). Because our model is based on empowering connectors to be our "feet on the street" to collect and maintain information and publicize our services, rapid growth due to franchise business model will not be surprising. Here are some of the reasons: People of the neighborhood are best work force to manage their neighborhood content business. Where quality of content can be maintained through a sense of pride.
Matured networked computing technology will allow us to manage distributed architecture necessary to support growth for the franchise organization.
Neighborhoods in different parts of the country have needs unique to the locality. This cannot be managed from HQ.
Autonomy of Sales and marketing program will provide better ROI for our customers.
Managing growth and quality of service by making franchise a profit and loss center is superior to a hierarchical P/L accounting structure.
Efficient method of recruiting and empowering connectors. It will also be training ground of future work force in various industry.
This allows business opportunity to people of the neighborhoods and train them to become economically valuable to the community they live in. If you are interested in using our business model and technology to make a stand in your neighborhood, lets talk. We only want serious applicants, we will look at where you live, what is your stake in the community currently, how connected are you to get feedback and publicize the service and finally do you understand the needs of the community. To contact us, Phone: 1-888-246-0130, (818)-348-5633, Email:
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