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Source:Mashable!

MapQuest today launched its new homepage design that aims at reducing the amount of time you spend surfing through the site’s pages and keeps you doing more of what you want.

According to the company’s Vice President of product development, Mark Law, MapQuest has received countless messages from users asking execs to revamp the site and make it a more useful tool for getting work done quickly and efficiently.  And in order to do so, MapQuest’s latest design (which, right now, mostly impacts the homepage) tries to take the site from a “directions and map service” to a “location-centric” service that provides mapping and directions.

The improved MapQuest homepage now features a map that displays the location you input into the box above it.  MapQuest said that most of its users — about 48 million unique — simply didn’t want to move from page to page when searching on a map and it decided to make the front page the place to get practically everything.

Included in that map, the new MapQuest homepage will allow you to get gas prices and see where construction is going on in a cleaner interface than before.  On top of that, it will feature a Weather section and available live cams (in certain cities) to show you what’s happening on the ground.

MapQuest is also using its AOL ownership and will now display different AOL properties at the bottom of the page, like City Guide, which lets you search for point of interest and practically anything else in the city you’re viewing.

More importantly, MapQuest is using the bottom of the page to see if users want the information to be included in the maps.  Want to find the best burger in New York with City Guide on MapQuest maps?  If so, tell the company that you want to do it and if enough people agree, it’ll integrate that into the maps.

MapQuest claims getting directions will be easier too.  Instead of offering two search boxes like it does now, the new MapQuest homepage will leave the directions box “greyed out” until you decide to search for directions.  Once you do, it’ll work just as it does now.

I had the opportunity to see the new MapQuest homepage in action and it does look much cleaner and generally more useful than its predecessor.  That said, I don’t know if it’s really enough to make Google Maps users switch and MapQuest was quick to note that this is just the beginning of much more to come.

The company wouldn’t tell me any more than that, but as more of its pages are revamped and it improves its offerings, it’ll be interesting to see what will come of it.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:MapQuest Maps Get GreenMapQuest’s Latest API Utilizes Actionscript 3MapQuest Debuts Traffic Data FeaturesAOL’s New Mobile Services to take Geo-Presence MainstreamGarmin Teams Up with Google and MapQuest for Simple Data TransfersYahoo Maps Major Upgrades – Whose Maps Do You Like Best?MapQuest Releases Open APIs With New Free Dev Platform

Source:Mashable!

DriverSide, the web-based service for helping you keep tabs on your car health and maintenance, has announced its acquisition of fairBenjamin in order to expand on its own technology and access to local mechanics in a given area. The amount of the acquisition has not been disclosed, but both services are fairly new, having been launched in 2007, with DriverSide raising an undisclosed amount of funding earlier this year.

You may recall that DriverSide offers a web-based tool to help you keep track of your current car’s needs, but it’s also a localized search engine that helps you find reliable and trusted mechanics in your area. One of DriverSide’s main objectives is to connect users with mechanics, offering points of comparison for everything car related, from the prices of various automobile parts to the maintenance schedules of your vehicle according to the manufacturer versus actual maintenance reports.

An important part of DriverSide’s growth on this end is its ability to offer an easy-to-use platform for sharing things like actual maintenance data so that consumers can have a factual set of information to work from, while also connecting them with the mechanics in their area. fairBenjamin has a patent-pending process for connecting these consumers with local mechanics, and its this access that DriverSide finds valuable in its long-term goals.

This acquisition will help DriverSide provide better estimates to consumers for repair costs, and offering overall value to end users. When it’s all said and done, the most useful car maintinance site will be the one that presents accurate information in a format that lessens the amount of time a given user will need to spend doing the research, and DriverSide has acquired fairBenjamin in an effort to move towards this direction.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:DriverSide: Automated, Web-Based Car Maintenance [The Startup Review]RepairPal Tracks the “Health” of your Car, From Buy to SellExclusive - Yahoo.icio.us Reveals New Logo!SheKnows Continues to Grow Women’s Network: Acquires LovingYouDivX Acquires Veatros to Create Enhanced Video Search & Discovery for the HomeGoogle Translator Hints at Upcoming FeaturesBuzznet Acquires Music Blog Idolator from Gawker Media

Source:Mashable!

As Stan noted last week, Muxtape has been voluntarily brought down due to concerns over the RIAA, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from traipsing down that same harrowing path yourself, particularly since there’s now an open source web package you can run yourself to completely duplicate the functionality of MuxTape.

Josh Catone over at SitePoint just found it, it’s aptly called OpenTape. It’s exactly a one-for-one translation of the original MuxTape with one significant difference - a faceless startup won’t be fronting the legal liability for you to post up a virtual mixtape of your favorite artists.  If the RIAA doesn’t like what they hear, it’s all on you, bub.

Josh sees some possible stumbling blocks in the future for OpenTape:

The obvious one is legal: how many people will be willing to risk the RIAA’s wrath to publish a mixtape on their server? The second is content. What made Muxtape great was the ability to browse other mixtapes and find great new music. Without a way to aggregate and discover the mixtapes people are making and publishing with Opentape, it will be less attractive as a distributed service.

Here’s where I see OpenTape succeeding where so many others have failed: the ability to put the server offshore. I’ve actually had a chance to talk to some lawyers on this topic to see if it’d fly like I imagine it would, and I’m told I’m spot on.  During the last time licensing issues came to play in the blogosphere, we were talking about Pandora and their inability to sustain their business while paying 70% of revenue in licensing fees.

What I see OpenTape potentially leading to is a boon for web hosting companies who set up shop in countries with particularly laxy enforcement of copyright, and widespread installation of OpenTape and other similar services. Folks who want to set up a Muxtape clone would be the prime market here. Another potential market would be folks who buy a shared hosting plan to host a few OpenTape instances of their own without getting worried about owing thousands of dollars per infringing song.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 3:32 am and is filed under News, music, Web apps, Opinion, Muxtape, opentape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.