Sam Giffney of Zenbu

Here at iPhonewzealand, part of our mission is to turn the spotlight on the burgeoning community of local Kiwi developers who create apps for Mobile OSX through Apple’s App Store. These digital pioneers are keeping the iPhone relevant to New Zealand, and some of them are making their fortune in the process. In the first of the series, I caught up with Sam Giffney of Zenbu, the little battler taking on the dinosaurs of the ‘find it’ market, such as Yellow Pages.

If you haven’t already download Zenbu to your iPhone, do it now. Of all the apps I’ve downloaded, I can put hand on heart and say honestly that this is one of the most frequently used and genuinely useful one of them all. It’s basically a catalogue of more-or-less every business in New Zealand that resides locally on your iPhone, taking up no more data than a couple of tracks. It finds listings with such speed and efficiency that you’ll never look to traditional sources again. You can tell it specific company names such as ‘Bond and Bond’ and it will list every branch in order of distance from your current position, or you can input a category such as ‘Electrical Goods’ and have it suggest some places for you.

The killer feature though is its ability to help you find a business by way of its proximity to another business. Say for example you can’t remember the name of the Thai restaurant you want to go to for dinner, but you can remember that there’s a Blockbuster Video a couple of doors down – fine, simply look up the Blockbuster Video and Zenbu will tell you which other businesses are around it.

So who is Sam Giffney, and what drove him to start Zenbu?

“I’ve always had a fascination with technology” Sam tells me. “I learned to program on the Apple IIe. Plus I’ve been addicted to collecting things all my life: Garbage Pail Kids cards, Groo comics, books, CDs, languages, adventures — so it was probably inevitable that I ended up working in the directory industry collecting information.

“In 2006, inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s ‘What is Web 2.0′ article, the pathetic web presence of Yellow Pages and other sell-side oriented directories at the time, I decided to fix it myself and started Zenbu.

“The core idea of Zenbu was to create an online resource of information that was freely available to people walking down the street; who or what is where and when, how do we contact them. Names, addresses, numbers, opening hours and the key descriptive words soliciting our attention on a street sign. Where is the nearest ATM? When does the Warehouse open? What is that BYO Thai restaurant in Ponsonby? Zenbu was designed to answer those simple questions that we ask every day. Local search designed for users, not the entities being searched. Zenbu is not just businesses but also parks, public toilets and anything that is public. Zenbu crowd-sources the information (anyone can add/edit content like Wikipedia) and releases it freely under a Creative Commons Attribution license.”

Sam is a busy man and still keeps his toes dipped in the waters of the traditional media industry that he aims to ‘fix’ with Zenbu.

“For the last 7 years I’ve been, and still am, the GM of the New Zealand franchise of Kompass, a global Business To Business (B2B) directory; much like a B2B yellow pages for the world. Kompass NZ is a small business with 5 staff that collects and sells comprehensive information about the people, brands, products & services of B2B companies. Kompass is Web 1.0 to the core, classic old media publishing. It’s a good little business but opposite to Zenbu in so many ways. Kompass pays my way, and enables me to play with new technologies in Zenbu outside of a rigid, franchise framework.”

I asked Sam what made him decide to launch an app for the iPhone and how he went about it. Is he surprised that the ‘big boys’ like Yellow Pages haven’t tried to muscle into the iPhone market?

“I love gadgets and bought an iPhone from the USA in the bad, old days when you had chop up your sim card and insert a small chip to get access to the NZ network. Zenbu is most useful with ubiquitous access so I needed it on my phone but felt that the costs and latencies of mobile data were prohibitive. An iPhone could store an entire directory on it in place of a few mp3s so I figured a built in app would be faster and cheaper for users.

“I bought a Mac Mini when the iPhone SDK came out in mid 2008. There were no books at the time, no user forums (banned by Apple) and no help outside of the Apple documentation which was thick, but not authoritative. I hadn’t done any Mac programming since Hello World on the Apple IIe in the 1980s so it took me a month of reading and searching to get my head around it all and figure out if what I wanted to do was even possible. It was so I locked myself to the computer for a week and then released the Zenbu iPhone app 1.0. I put together a Windows Mobile app in a few days just because it was so easy to port.

“A Big-Boy like Yellow is too big and slow moving to jump on a new technology like the iPhone. It’s surely a missed opportunity for them. Local search has a massive future and mobile is a big part of that, these days you need to move fast just to keep up.”

The app enjoyed great success at first but Sam has found it a challenge to keep the momentum going.

“The app was released in August 08 and was on the Top Free Apps list for quite a while, but it’s hard to stay there as ‘newness’ is a large part of the calculation. Thousands of people are downloading the monthly updates which is cool. Traffic on www.zenbu.co.nz grew 15% every month over the last year and I’m sure the app helped raise awareness. The app doesn’t require a net connection as all the Zenbu data is on the device so the app is designed NOT to send traffic to the website.

“The expectation is that only 1-2% of users will contribute back to an open source project like Zenbu so anytime we get more people using the data it adds to the positive feedback loop. Adding and editing content on Zenbu is dead simple and we encourage every user to make sure the things they want are on Zenbu.”

The focus for the future is on refining the abilities of the app rather than making a fortune from it, and Sam is resigned to the fact that he won’t be drawing a pay check any time soon. “I want to be able to find everything on Zenbu and to have that information available to everyone at their fingertips. It’s a simple thing that makes life in NZ that much better.

“Zenbu is ‘ramen-profitable’ right now but I’m past my days of living on noodles so I won’t be giving up the day job just yet. I really enjoy having a project that is on the cutting edge of technologies and trends. It’s exciting to watch the site grow and the community create an invaluable resource, especially as Zenbu starts to get more attention and people contact us to offer large lists of data, like the car dealer database received from an industry-insider this month. I love seeing other people use the Zenbu data to build other projects such as the NZ Open GPS Maps or even the FindNZ! iPhone app (aka the alternative/unofficial Zenbu app). It’s been a fun ride so far and I’m keen to see how far we can take it.”

Finally, I wanted to know how the iPhone fits in to Sam’s personal life. Is he as obssessed with it as we are at iPhonewzealand?!

“The iPhone is an integral part of my daily routine. I check my email and read the news from bed every morning on the iPhone. It’s my mp3 player, dictionary and, of course, connection to Zenbu on the go. I try to avoid games on any platform because once I start, I won’t stop till I clock it (although I made a recent exception for World of Goo). I did get a free HTC Magic Android phone from the Google I/O conference in May, it’s 90% as good as the iPhone so Apple better keep innovating. I tried using it as my main phone and it was pretty good (the integration with Google products is awesome) but it doesn’t have a native Zenbu app so I’m back on the iPhone (for now!)”

Tags: devs, search, Spotlight
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