“Government 2.0” has been a big buzzword of 2009, with thought-leaders like Tim O’Reilly and The Sunlight Foundation showing the way. It’s a movement that pushes public institutions to use technologies that have thrived in the last five years (like social networking and blogging) to foster closer relationships with citizens. This entails being more open with data and encouraging people to build apps around that data and transform it through mashups for use by others.

A few city governments have made good on their pledges to be more transparent. San Francisco unveiled DataSF, a central clearinghouse for data collected by the city, and showcases some apps here. New York City went a step further, launching a full-on apps contest through Betaworks-backed startup ChallengePost.

It’s been almost three months since the contest launched, and several interesting applications have turned up. You can check them out here. (To be clear, some of the data for these apps is collected through government institutions and some of it is bootstrapped.). But here are a few of the highlights:

Primospot: Hands down, the biggest pain of owning a car in a major metropolitan city is finding a place to park. Primospot is building a database of all parking regulations in Boston and New York, so you can figure out where you’re legally allowed to park now or in the near future. Primospot generates maps like the one above, showing what’s in the red zone and what’s not. Primospot can also send you text messages for when your parking space is about to expire, and you can search for parking that’ll be available in the near future.

And, in case you don’t think it gets any better, you can also compare parking garage prices in real-time. The company just launched an iPhone app called iPark, so you can record where you’ve parked in case you forget.

All in all, it seems like a very helpful app and one that’s sorely needed in a city like San Francisco that has poor public transportation. The user interface could be a smidgen better. I’d rather see markers showing how much of the curb is available for parking rather than noting a single point along several blocks. It’s a helpful start, though, and the team has been very aggressive in adding features every month.

Bookzee: This app helps you find available library books nearby. You can search for books either on the web site or through the iPhone app and it will show you which nearby libraries have a particular book available. Again, it’s only available in New York. San Francisco’s library system has its own online search, although it could benefit from a facelift and some mobile availability.

Taxihack: Rude taxi drivers better watch out. This app lets people leave Twitter-style mini-reviews of drivers using their medallion number. The interface is barebones for now, but it’s a big step up from the old way of reporting poor taxi drivers (call 311 and testify before the Taxi & Limousine Commission). Now if only there was a way to take photos of medallions and pull up reviews, Google Goggles-style. I guess that’s for another day …

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Reuters - Australian shares rose on Tuesday, helped by gains in oil and metals and by merger activity, but stock markets elsewhere in Asia lagged as year-end activity dwindled, and the dollar’s rally ran out of steam.

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Most of us have special requests when we travel, but don’t really expect our lodging providers to be interested in these much less take them into account. Nevertheless, celebrities, heads of state and royalty can depend on their lodging providers to cater to their every whim. If Alexander Torrenegra, serial web entrepreneur and founder of new venture LetMeGo.com, has his way, you may soon get the same kind of service.

With LetMeGo.com, travelers upload their travel arrangements along with dates, places and any special requirements (see screen shot at bottom). Want chocolates in your room? Fluffy slippers? Just ask. Then all types of lodging providers (vacation homes, Bed & Breakfasts, hotels, etc.) can bid on their itinerary. Users can see the pricing and other data sent by each bidder, and every bidder can see other bids. But none of this information is made public; it’s between the user and the lodging providers.

Torrenegra (pictured) recognized there were inefficiencies in the lodging industry while working as a consultant for lodging web site Rentalo.com back in 2000. The problem he saw was that much of the digital infrastructure was riding atop early work in travel reservation systems such as Sabre. He decided to circumvent these systems and their associated fees by establishing a direct connection between travelers and all types of lodging providers (e.g., Bed & Breakfasts, hotels, vacation rentals, etc.).

After spending the last two years refining the technology that handles bids, signing up lodgings and making sure the infrastructure (e.g., customer service agents) is in place to attend to customer needs, Torrenegra’s number one focus continues to be that of creating a differentiated customer experience. If he’s able to execute on this, he’s confident that lodging establishments (especially, niche or smaller lodgings looking to differentiate themselves) will continue to bid on customer itineraries and pass along a small commission to the company.

When I was a Venture Capitalist in Latin America, I was struck by the lack of ambition of a lot of startups as well as questions about their ability to execute. With LetMeGo.com, I see a highly ambitious objective (the vacation rental market alone is estimated to be a $24B opportunity in the US) as well as a team with the chops to execute. My biggest concern for the company is that fact they may be biting off more than they can chew, but that qualm quickly goes away as I chat with Torrenegra.

Torrenegra moved to the US several years ago from Bogota, Colombia. A number of years ago, after observing how difficult it was for his wife to promote her voiceover services, he created Voice123.com and has since positioned it as the leading site for promoting voiceover talent.

He still has strong ties to Bogota, where principal development for Voice123.com took place and where LetMeGo.com was gestated during the past two years.

The LetMeGo.com team has already has a good number of hotel and lodgings signed up. In my mind, the biggest hurdle is getting enough users to actually insert their itineraries and, in general, changing customer and supplier behavior (talk about ambitious). But the young company already has an aggressive affiliate program ready to launch as well as plans to translate the site to Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin or Cantonese.

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“Government 2.0” has been a big buzzword of 2009, with thought-leaders like Tim O’Reilly and The Sunlight Foundation showing the way. It’s a movement that pushes public institutions to use technologies that have thrived in the last five years like social networking and blogging to foster closer relationships with citizens. This entails being more open with data, and encouraging regular people to transform it through mashups and apps for use by others.

A few city governments have made good on their pledges to be more transparent. San Francisco unveiled DataSF, a central clearinghouse for data collected by the city, and showcases some apps here. New York City went a step further, launching a full-on apps contest through Betaworks-backed startup ChallengePost.

It’s been almost three months since the contest launched, and several interesting applications have turned up. Here are a few, and you can check out the rest here. (To be clear, some of the data for these apps is collected through the government like with Bookzee and some of it is bootstrapped.)

Primospot: Hands down, the biggest pain of owning a car in a major metropolitan city is finding a place to park. Primospot is building a database of all parking regulations in Boston and New York, so you can figure out where you’re legally allowed to park now or in the near future. Primospot generates maps like the one above, showing what’s in the red zone and not. Primospot can also send you text messages for when your parking space is about to expire and you can search for parking in the near future (in case you’re working during the day and want to figure out where to park when you go out at night.) And, in case you don’t think it gets any better, you can also compare parking garage prices in real-time. The company just launched an iPhone app called iPark, so you can record where you’ve parked in case you forget it.

All in all, it seems like a very helpful app and one that’s sorely needed in a public transportation-asphyxiated city like San Francisco. The user interface could be a smidgen better. I’d rather see markers showing how much of the curb is available for parking rather than noting a single point along several blocks. It’s a helpful start and the team has been very aggressive in adding features every month.

Bookzee: This app helps you find available library books nearby. You can search for books either on the web site or through the iPhone app and it will show you which nearby libraries have it available. Again, it’s only available in New York. San Francisco’s library system has its own online search, through it could benefit from a facelift and some mobile availability.

Taxihack: Rude taxi drivers better watch out. This app lets people leave Twitter-style mini-reviews of drivers using their medallion number. The interface is barebones for now, but it’s a big step up from the old way of reporting poor taxi drivers. (That was to call 311 and testify before the Taxi & Limousine Commission.) Now if only there was a way to take photos of medallions and pull up reviews, Google Goggles-style. That’s for another day…

Read the whole story on Venture Beat

All over the social Web these days, there’s a race to get as many friends, followers, readers, or subscribers as possible—most of them people you don’t know. As location-based social applications like Foursquare and Gowalla grow, they’re broadcasting your location to all those people, connecting you in one more way to a lot of people you’ve never heard of. As our “circle of friends” grows out of control, we wind up more public than we mean to be, sharing information with everyone just to be able to share it with our real friends.

New location app Rally is different, though. There’s no way to add Rally friends from Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else, because as Rally sees it, those aren’t really your friends. The only way to find someone on Rally is to look for them, which seems to be an effective way of narrowing the scope down to people you know. By intentionally stripping down the friend graph, and making friends come only from Rally, real friends can keep up with each other and keep everyone else out.

Other than that, Rally works a lot like Foursquare or Gowalla, letting you check in at a given location (restaurant, movies, etc) so your friends know where you are—you can even include a picture with your check-in information.

If you see a friend is somewhere, you can click “I’m on the way,” and let them know you’re coming to hang out. There’s also a bit of the game aspect, with users able to earn badges and the like–even more badges than Foursquare, potentially.

While Foursquare and Gowalla could be used the same way as Rally (letting you select friends one at a time), they’re integrated with Twitter and Facebook and encourage you to push all your location data into your other networks. So Rally’s not the only application that can restrict who gets your information, it’s the only one that doesn’t give you another option. The intent of Rally, more than the uniqueness of the use case, is what makes Rally notable.

Forcing users to rebuild their friend graph is a risky maneuver, and it remains to be seen if Rally can work on a large scale and do well enough to convince people to seek out all their friends on the service. It’ll be interesting to watch the company over the next few months to see how it fares.

Rally’s business plan is simple, as co-founder Sol Lipman told TechCrunch: using location to serve advertising. The potential with location-based ads is huge—you could walk by a store and find its coupons for the day, or see the happy hour specials at every bar within a six-block radius of you. Foursquare and other companies are making these kinds of deals, and Foursquare has already raised $1.35 million to extend into 100 cities, while Gowalla’s already got $10.3 million in the bank.

For right now, Rally is iPhone-only (available in the App Store), and is only usable for those in Santa Cruz, Calif. But the company says it’s going to be expanding both platform and location availability.

Rally is based in Santa Cruz. Many members of the startup team were on the team that created 12seconds, a short-form, video-based social network.

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A nonprofit tracks emissions and persuades some companies to change policies before governments step in.

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In a court filing, a former employee, Paul A. Galloway, said that Seagate had appropriated hard-drive technology from Convolve for its own products.

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Credit card interchange fees became a hot issue in 2009.  Big retailers got hot under the collar — and so did small merchants who are watching their profits with a hawk’s eye.

Interchange, or “swipe” fees are fees that credit card companies and banks charge every time customers use a credit card to make a  purchase from them.  These fees typically range from 1% to 3%  of the price of a purchase.  The fees are charged to the retailers.

Some small retailers find these fees cutting unacceptably deep into already-slim profit margins.  For instance, this article from  Bozeman Montana points out how much credit card fees eat into small retail transactions and gasoline purchases.  As a result, some retailers are offering discounts to customers who pay cash. Even with the discount, the retailers net more per sale than when they accept credit cards and have to pay the interchange fees — that’s how much of a bite those fees take.

In September of 2009, franchisees of 7-Eleven convenience stores around the country picketed the U.S. Capitol, calling themselves victims of interchange fees.  Instead of the usual “don’t mess with business” message, this crowd was actually inviting lawmakers to step in.  They requested that lawmakers limit interchange fees.

And in a blog op-ed from earlier this month, the head of a grocery and convenience store trade association calls for Congress to “level the playing field” for small businesses.

Leveling the Playing Field, or Protectionism?

But is it really leveling the playing field?  Or is this about giving one specific subset of businesses (small retailers in price-sensitive industries) protection?

When it comes to small business, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” Help one group, and you may hurt another.

Remember the efforts to protect the steel industry a number of years ago?  That backfired.   It protected one industry (steel producers)  but at the same time raised costs for others (small manufacturers and end users of steel). Eventually the steel tariffs were reversed, when it became evident that protecting one industry came at the expense of others.

Today that Unpopular Business, Tomorrow YOUR Business

Controlling credit card interchange fees sounds black and white when you have a noble cause.  ‘The ends justify the means,’ you think. ‘After all, someone has to look out for small businesses and protect them.’  The idea appeals to our David-versus-Goliath sensibilities.

But where does “protectionism” end?  What if the tables are turned, and it’s government telling YOUR small business how much profit you can make?

Let’s say, for example, that you have a Web design business, and you normally charge $95 a hour.  That may sound like a lot — outrageous to some people.  But you know different.  You have to pay your employees’ wages, cover their benefits, pay rent and overhead, pay for advertising and marketing to attract clients, pay for various business services, and still try to make a profit for yourself as owner.

Then the government steps in to tell you that you can only charge $75/hour.  Would you consider the government to be “helping”?  Few small business owners I know want government telling them how to set prices.

No Easy Answers

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked into the subject of interchange fees during the year.  Their  report (PDF) concluded this is not a simple straight-forward issue with easy answers:

1. Some or all of those interchange fees may have been passed on to consumers already.  Who’s to say that if fees were reduced, it would result in lower costs for consumers.  Chances are, the fees have already been recouped by retailers, at least in part.
   
2. Some small business owners feel that being able to offer credit actually is a net positive, despite the fees.  Customers using credit cards tend to spend more, the seller gets access to the funds immediately and doesn’t have to contend with bad checks or collection issues.
3. The GAO also pointed out the risk that credit card issuers, when hit with lower revenue from fees, might decrease the availability of credit, and could cut back on rewards cards—moves that would harm both consumers and retailers.

The Credit Card Interchange Fees Act of 2009, which Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT.) introduced because he contends “credit card fees are killing small businesses,” would limit the fees merchants accepting credit cards could be charged. The bill would also prevent charging higher fees to merchants when customers use reward cards, and would give the Federal Trade Commission the right to review interchange-fee practices. Other legislation that is under consideration would give merchants more freedom to negotiate fees with their banks.

Regulation May Set the Wrong Precedent

So what’s the answer?  It’s a mixed bag.  While at first glance it sounds noble to help small retailers battle an unpopular industry, on the other hand it really amounts to a form of protectionism.  And that may set a precedent that we as small business owners would find unacceptable if the tables were turned.

From Small Business Trends

Small Retailers Seek Limits on Credit Card Interchange Fees, But Is It Protectionism?

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Over the past couple of weeks, startup Dorthy.com quietly rolled out a major upgrade to the self-styled social search site, making the personal-goal site available just in time to capture your New Year’s resolutions.

The company behind Dorthy wants you to use the site to make — and keep — your personal resolutions for 2010, and more generally all of your long-terms goals.

Dorthy hosts what it calls dreampages. Members set up a sharable dreampage with an avowed personal goal, whether it’s “build wells in Africa” or “date a cougar.”

Afterwards, the site automatically adds articles, photos, videos, and status updates to your page, based on what it knows about you.  The page becomes a bookmarkable record of your progress toward the goal. For well-understood goals such as “run a half marathon,” it’s easy to understand how a page of collected articles on training and running specifically a half-marathon, not a full one, could quickly surpass those found on the first page of a Google search.

You also get a news feed of notes and plans posted by other members.

I spoke on the phone with COO Jordan English Gross and CTO Jim Anderson. Thanks to modern sputtery phone service, I had trouble tracking who said what. So I’ll paraphrase.

Dorthy’s own goal is to create a way for Internet users to “move beyond search.” Anderson spent years doing speech recognition research for IBM before moving to About.com, where he focused on search engine optimization and the creation of About’s topical niche pages.

If you think about it, he says, a large number of people search for the same things every day to see what’s new. Dorthy’s pages are designed to hopefully remove the need to re-Google a favorite topic every day. And by  finding people whose goals intersect with yours, you can quickly create a collaborative page of your collective, collected knowledge.

Search keywords are, despite their power, a limited way to find information. Human-curated pages like those at Mahalo let people use their own smarts to cluster like with like. The Dorthy team see their dreampages the same way: Because a human being associates each piece of information with a dreampage, that info needn’t match specific keywords to be added to the page’s collection of resources.

How do they make money? First, the company plans to sell market research culled from its members’ behavior and pages. Second, they plan to sell aspiration-targeted advertising onto the dreampages, which have clear potential as a place to bring people and brand advertisers together. Imagine the obvious sponsors for a page about wanting to run a half-marathon, or to do good in the Third World. Brand managers in particular like these sort of aspirational, topical pages, as opposed to trying to guess what keywords to match on Google.

Dorthy, founded in New York City in 2007, has received one round of $4 million in funding from the Coyne Group and various angel investors.

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Jingle Networks, the startup that operates 1-800-FREE-411, a national telephone directory service, has raised $6.75 million in new venture funding, according to an SEC filing. Based in Menlo park, Calif., the company received this recent round from undisclosed investors.

It has now raised an impressive $88.7 million to date from a group including First Round Capital, Lead Dog Ventures, Liberty Associated Partners, Rose Tech Ventures, Goldman Sachs, the Hearst Corporation, Flybridge Capital, IDG Ventures and Comcast Interactive Capital.

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