By now ya’all know that I love public transportation. One of the areas I like in the tech area regarding public transportation is watching all of the map mashups that have been launched over the past couple of years. I’ve written about the BusTime testing in NYC, the live London train map and the real-time Swiss train mashup. Four years ago I wrote about how tourists should consider taking the bus – it’s often overlooked in cities that offer a subway system.

Today I’ve learned about a new Google Maps mashup using bus data from the TFL in London. It’s called the London BusMapper and the developers describe the service as, “Can’t figure out which bus to take in London?Click on 2 points on the map and we’ll tell you!”

It’s really that easy to use the London BusMapper – just click on any two points in London on the map and it will show you all of the routes that get you from point A to point B. What’s really neat is that it shows you routes that start and end near your location so you can make the choice that works best overall.

The London BusMapper was developed by Mattias, Azmat and Ben Dowling. The team is actively encouraging suggestions on what features to build into the London BusMapper. So far the most popular suggestions include: creating a mobile version, time per route option, and to make sure the system takes into account any diversions for construction, etc.

Find more stories about: Google Maps, InsideTransit, London, transit

This weekend, I was reconnected with a company that I met during my September Seedcamp visit in London who, as many other companies in the “group communication” space have before, asked to catch up to discuss some of the successes we had experienced at eGroups during our growth phase.

I promised to catch up when he was here in NYC, and we recently sat down with him to discuss some of the issues that I believed are important to a group manager and how to frame the product discussion if they were trying to find their growth.

After the first deep dive, I realized that David (the CEO of GroupSpaces) really had a functional handle on the product. Both he and his co-founder were group organizers back in uni (British for “college”) and were frustrated with Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups and even Facebook event management. So, four years ago – they started building GroupSpaces and started addressing their own needs. Just the two of them – and they began to build out an incredibly robust platform for group managers. So he showed me the product in its current form.

I was honestly blown away.
I am not kidding – after running numerous groups and having to connect and coordinate different platforms and datafeeds between bulk-email providers, my membership roles, event planning tools, creating subgroups with specific permissions (meaning I would have to have special sub groups on the Google or Yahoo platforms) – when I started diving into GroupSpaces, I realized I am moving off of Google and Yahoo! Groups for any of my active groups.

Real Power at the Hands of the Group Manager
One of the things that made me smile as I began to use the toolset found within GroupSpaces was the ease of integrating my membership roles to the different applications that are found within the service. Listed are:

• Membership Management – which is incredibly intuitive and easy to use
• Email management – not only for list communication, but also for a small bulk-email set that looks like a trimmed down version of every email templating software I have seen to date. In addition, also supports basic click-thru and open tracking along with bounces.
• Event management – imagine if you had the best of Evite, EventBrite and Facebook events controlled from a single interface. You have found the tool for that at GroupSpaces.
• Templating the GroupSpaces for your group is a breeze with their tool set. Again, it is almost as if they looked at how Ning did the effort, threw in a little weebly and created a much more effective tool set.
• Payments – allowing groups to create payment mechanisms for their events through a simplified interface
• and a whole lot more.

Now, from looking at this product and beginning to play with it – I am blown away. I have not see anything come this close to an effective group communication platform since one of the advocacy platforms that got scooped up by Convio back in 2006.

If you are an existing group and are frustrated with the limitations of your group site / community system – I am giving a VERY hearty recommendation to you to consider using the GroupSpaces platform.

What Does it Cost?
Its a freemium model (Fred Wilson, are you listening?) – for the basic package which is quite excellent. But the next level up is only $15/mo and gives you 5000 email addresses you can mail to. Considering that most bulk-mail services cost the same for half that number of email addresses, the cost is rapidly covered right there.

If I was going to say what would be the better platform for small businesses or non-profits who are getting tired of exorbitant fees from platform providers and consultants, GroupSpaces is the way to go.

AN IDEA: What if SquareSpace had a deal with GroupSpaces? Could be a deal made in heaven! As the yenta, I want to name the baby.

Find more stories about: GroupSpaces, London, Sanford Dickert, startups

Phil Gainley from FounderSpeak has put together a detailed, in-depth report regarding bootstrapped startups. As an aside, I hope one day we can get to industry accepted definitions for “bootstrapped” and “startup”. Two years ago I provided my definitions for both terms and many CN readers provided their own definitions. For example, can a company started in 2005 really still be considered a startup?

Phil’s analysis provides a lot of data points around bootstrapped startups and is well worth a read. Phil interviewed 107 startups to gather the data for the report. Phil notes, “included is a breakdown of trends in the tech space, what the lifetime and demographics of a startup looks like and where they fail and what their biggest problems are. Also it has my latest research around the tech startup space all put into a process that other tech startups can use that is around 10 pages long. This research will be part of my Aston Business School MBA.”

The survey provides data and charts on the following areas:

• Number of founders
• How do you provide monetary support for your startup
• Monthly hardware costs
• Misc. spending costs per month – marketing, networking, travel, etc.
• What phase is your startup currently in
• How long have you been working on your startup
• When do you expect to reach breakeven
• Why haven’t you reached breakeven yet
• Type of product/service

I think it would be great to be able to refine the data – for example, breakeven data for startups with 2 founders that are in business more than 18 months, etc. I believe most of the startup data in the report comes from startups based in London/UK and note that the monetary figures are in pounds not dollars.

Find more stories about: analytics, bootstrapped, London, reporting, startups

If you are a regular CN reader, you know that I am a railfan and a big fan of public transportation. We’ve covered real-time transit maps from around the world. My favorite up until today was the Swiss train map mashup — the map shows you where all of the trains in Switzerland are in real-time.

We’ve seen other cities including NYC, Boston and Philly get in on the real-time craze. NYC has a bus tracker on the M34 and M16 lines in midtown Manhattan and Philly is running a real-time test of a bus tracker.

Today, some developers in London, my second favorite transit system, launched a real-time transit tracker. The Google Maps mashup shows trains in the London Underground (also known as the Tube) in real-time. I’ve included a screenshot below. Yellow markers are stations and red markers are moving trains. Note that London’s transit system doesn’t run overnight so there won’t be any markers if you look during the overnight hours.

The code for the mashup is available as open source on GitHub. Here’s the overview of how the system works, “Live departure data is fetched from the TfL API, and then it does a bit of maths and magic. It’s surprisingly okay given this was done in only a few hours at Science Hackday and the many naming/location issues encountered, some unresolved. A small number of stations are misplaced or missing; occasional trains behave oddly; some H&C stations are missing in the TfL feed.”

It’s awesome to see so many transit systems embracing new technology and encouraging developers and entrepreneurs to get involved. Many of the world’s top transit systems seemed to move so slowly for decades but in the last 12-18 months, there has been a rapid pace to involve the local communities. This new London Underground real-time map is now my favorite Google Maps mashup – I hope one day we will see NYC host something similar.

Find more stories about: Google Maps, London, Open Source, realtime, transit

Last week London-based Skimlinks launched the SkimKit, a tool that helps publishers find products that have affiliate opportunities attached. Martin Bryant from Next Web has a good overview from the launch of the SkimKit service.

This morning I met with Skimlinks founder and CEO Alicia Navarro in NYC to learn more about her service and the new SkimKit launch. It was a great conversation because it combined a product demo/pitch with a good industry discussion.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Alicia noted that one of the benefits (actually the main benefit) of using Skimlinks over signing up for affiliate programs yourself is that you will generally make more money because Skimlinks typically receives the highest commission levels while most affiliates will generally stay in the lowest bucket. Skimlinks takes a cut of the earned revenue (25%) but even with the split, you will most likely still earn more. You also only need to signup once with Skimlinks and then you can participate in all of the programs that Skimlinks supports – over 7,500 of them.

The SkimKit is an Adobe Air application that helps publishers find products for the stories they are writing. If you are familiar with how Zemanta helps you find links for your stories, the SkimKit does the same thing for products except that the SkimKit only shows products where there is an affiliate relationship.

The idea behind the SkimKit is to make it super easy for writers (especially teams of writers) to find product links to include in their blog posts and articles. The SkimKit also provides short URLs for sharing links in emails along with direct share links for Twitter and Facebook.

Skimlinks has grown from just Alicia to now 20 employees all based in London. Their widget is “loaded” to over 470 million unique visitors a month and the javascript that loads the Skimlinks service is loaded 300 times a second.

Also checkout Alicia’s guest post about building a startup in the UK.

Find more stories about: affiliate revenue, London, Skimbit, Skimlinks, startups

When you ride the subway, have you ever thought, “boy I’d like to get her on my Twitter”. Or what about, “his tush belongs on my Facebook”. Perhaps, “She would be a great friend for my feed”. But the problem is that it’s hard to go up to someone and tell them about your interests and desires on a train.

There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

Find more stories about: Boston, Chicago, InsideTransit, London, NYC, San Francisco, social media, Social Networking

Musician ecommerce widget service TheBizmo has announced their public U.S. launch today. Previously TheBizmo has been operating in private beta here in the U.S. and in full operations mode in the U.K.

TheBizmo has a NYC presence as well – David Hazan heads up their U.S. operations. You should see TheBizmo around NYC this summer as they are sponsoring a number of music conferences.

TheBizmo is described as offering, “a new embeddable e-commerce widget that enables artists to sell MP3s, videos, merchandise and more, straight to fans, from any social networking page, website, or blog.”  The service is free to setup and both the musician and TheBizmo share in the revenues. The musician earns the following:

• Music – 70% of retail
• Tickets – 100% of the face value of all tickets
• T-shirts – musician decides on the share
• All other offerings (ringtones, e-books, sheet music, etc.) - 70% of retail

After the musician creates their store, they can push it to Facebook, Ning, MySpace and other social networks. And since it’s a widget, it can be embedded anywhere. The service could be a good way for musicians to gain more visibility and new fans.

Find more stories about: London, music, startups, widgets

The LIRR (Long Island Rail Road) is a commuter rail line that runs from NYC out to the Hamptons. Yesterday on our sister blog InsideTransit, we wrote about a proposal from Senator Charles Schumer. Schumer has reached out to the Long Island Rail Road to get WiFi access for passengers noting, “make commuting more productive and pleasant.” Apparently Obama’s stimulus funds can be used to pay for the $1,000 per train fee to get the access installed. If we can get WiFi on a plane, why not on a train as well? It appears many other commuter rail lines around the world have WiFi access already. No word if commuters will have to pay for the WiFi access.

Robert Andrews from MocoNews is reporting that the UK regulator is investigating whether the UK’s National Rail violated any rules when they forced some third-party mobile apps developers offline while pushing their own new mobile train tracking application. Interestingly, the two apps that were pushed offline were free while the “official” app is just over $8.

The two apps in question are the  UK Train Times mobile web app and the MyRail iPhone app.

Robert notes, “Now the Office of the Rail Regulator (ORR) says it’s ‘investigating the supply of Real Time Train Information (RTTI) (by NRE) under the Competition Act 1998, having been made aware of concerns in this area including from members of the public, and from Members of Parliament on behalf of their constituents. RTTI is a key input into the provision of live train running information to passengers through media such as train information websites or services accessed over mobile phones.’”

I’d love to see real time tracking for bus and train service in the U.S. — it would be a great way to create more usable time for passengers.

Find more stories about: London, mobile

After the major launch of “Where It’s At” yesterday, today AOL has announced the launch of the AOL portal to the UK market. Last month we wondered why AOL pushed their big acquisition of Bebo aside to pimp Facebook and Twitter. The good news is that it seems Bebo is one of the top four being pushed in the UK version of the portal service.

It appears in the UK users prefer different types of content than we do here in the U.S. Here are some of the differences between the UK and US AOL portal sites:

UK version of My Stuff – shows Horoscopes over AOL Radio – all other items are the same

UK version of My Networks – here we see the UK version pushing Bebo over AIM and also pushes Twitter to slot 4 while the US version pimps Twitter first (which is a huge mistake) and doesn’t even list Bebo in the top 4.

The content and stories on the UK version appear to be UK-based which is a good thing.

Find more stories about: AOL, Bebo, London, Twitter

The Marketing Donut launched today and their goal is to, “provide small and medium-sized businesses with tools to make their marketing more effective.” The site is based out of the UK and they guarantee not to show any ads (although they show sponsor offers). The first two sponsors are Google and the Royal Mail (the post office for the U.K.).

The Marketing Donut gathered 100 experts to provide advice in a number of categories including PR, marketing, advertising, customer support, market research, events and strategy. There are also a number of pre-packaged themes for startups.

It looks like the experts traded their content for a listing in the consultants directory. The directory is broken up by location in the UK and each expert has a bio page and contact information.

The site has a lot of good content but what’s missing are the connections and subscriptions. For example, there appears to be no way to subscripe to the different content sections – either via RSS or an email notification once new content is added. They have a Twitter account but it’s not listed anywhere on the site. There’s a share button but only on some of the pages – sharing should always be everywhere! Same goes for the tools section – give me a way to be notified when you add more tools! This is the type of site that a person will visit and then might not return to – the email/rss is critical to get users to continually return.

Find more stories about: London, marketing, MarketingDonut, social media, startups

Earlier this week there was chatter about some schools in the U.K. swapping out normal education for more new-tech-oriented education. I mean who cares about what happened in the past, just how quickly we can type a SMS, enter a Google search or post a lolcat to Twitter.

Gumshoo has put together a comic strip related to the announcement which I thought was worth sharing:

Find more stories about: London, Quick News

WebMD has announced a new partnership with Boots (similar to CVS in the U.S.) in the UK to create a consumer health portal. The portal will combine health information from WebMD plus pharmacy and online sales via Boots.

"We are excited to be working with Boots UK as an important part of our strategy to expand WebMD’s presence internationally," said Wayne Gattinella, CEO and President, WebMD. "Boots is the recognized leader in pharmacy and healthcare in the UK. Together we will build a powerful new health information resource designed to help UK consumers lead healthier lives."

The new portal site will launch in mid-2009 and WebMD and Boots will share in the development costs of the site. WebMD will manage the online advertising on the site but both companies will share equally in the generated revenue.

Find more stories about: Europe, Health, London, Quick News, WebMD

In the SXSW expo hall, there’s an area dedicated to UK startups. I was able to grab a quick interview with CannyBill. Here’s their company overview, "CannyBill is a web based invoicing and billing solution for businesses and web designers. Easily create, send and manage invoices and accept payments online via credit card. You can also sell your products and services using order forms."

Check out the video below – we talk about what the company does and how it compares to other invoicing services like Freshbooks.

Find more stories about: cannybill, Conferences, London, Quick News, sxsw, Video, videos

Last Post is a London-based startup that hopes to help people leave last messages for their loved ones upon death. The company notes that, "1 person dies every 30 seconds in a car crash." Their goal is to help you setup letters today to leave for others. I have to admit it’s a bit of a different startup than we typically cover on CN.

What I don’t see on the site is how they know when the account holder has died. Last Post offers a variety of account plans which I’ve commented on below. The paid plans allow you to include printed pieces which you mail to the Last Post offices in London. Naturally anyone who creates an account with Last Post assumes they will be around long enough to deliver the mail and messages to your loved ones. 

The free account allows you to send 10 emails immediately upon death. They also offer yearly paid plans from GBP 9.99/year to GBP 29.99/year. This is where it gets interesting. The paid plans allow you to pick a date past death to send the letters. Let’s say you pick a date 5 years after death on an anniversary. The account holder pays the yearly fee until death. After that, Last Post notifies the recipient about the letter and then that recipient must pay the yearly fee until the letter is sent (in this case 5 years). This might be the most interesting business model I’ve seen lately.

There are so many songs about passing and not being able to say goodbye. Last Post is trying to change that – while I am not sure about their business model, I think the concept is a good one.

Find more stories about: email, Last Post, London, Quick News, Reviews, startups

Reviews site Yelp has announced the launch of a local site for UK residents today. The company notes that over 100,000 visitors from the UK visit Yelp monthly. It will be interesting to see what type of community builds around the UK Yelp and see how it compares to the USA or Canadian versions. I am an infrequent Yelp’er — I write a bunch of reviews but I wouldn’t consider myself part of the Yelp community.

Jemima Kiss of the Guardian has a good review of the Yelp UK launch. The comments on her post suggest that Yelp might have some work to do to win over the UK reviews audience. With Google aggregating reviews, there comes a point where a person can stay in their community and still be seen across the Web. 

Other local UK reviews site we have reviewed include WeLoveLocal and TrustedReviews.

Find more stories about: London, Quick News, Reviews, Yelp