EveryScape is set to announce today two new updates at Where 2.0: one to its online service and one to its business model. The mirror world is getting a local boost with EveryScape's new Ambassador program, hiring Destination Ambassadors to take ownership of local listings, updated public photography, and general information as well as Local Business Ambassadors to scale out EveryScape's business of transforming shops into online Scapes. Once users venture online, they'll find a host of new features, including tagging with videos, reviews, and public and private notes. The overall point for 2008, as CEO Jim Schoonmaker puts it, is "enabling the world to build the world."
"It took a lot of thinking and trying to get that model right," Schoonmaker continued. "We’re doing a blend of pure user-generated content and prosumer-generated content at this point. We pay [the Destination Ambassadors] to go shoot those cities and the Business Ambassadors have an economic incentive as well. As we go global, having a local presence own the territory is so much better than us doing it. There’s a host of reasons to build this capability major metro by major metro."
Ambassadors from the Mirror World
The ambassadors, paid directly by EveryScape and, in the case of the Destination Ambassadors, eligible for a revenue share from their area, must undergo professional training by EveryScape, and many are already almost prepared. The Destination Ambassadors, professional or amateur photographers, have a formal training period while the Local Business Ambassadors will be considered "assignment photogs" with a minimal amount of online training required.
The company is looking for "hundreds if not thousands" of Ambassadors through open, online applications.
The goal, explains Schoonmaker, differs from Google's similar Street View. While Google begins as a map, for EveryScape, the map is the end point. The beginning is the experience. Users approach EveryScape because they want to find a new restaurant by being there--and then stepping outside, looking around, and getting a true feel for the place. Then they look for directions.
That funnels into the process of assembling EveryScape.
"Our process is different from Street View," said Schoonmaker. "What’s really key is that local presence. The world is a big place and it changes a lot. If you don’t have a persistent, almost permanent, presence it can’t work."
That difference trickles down to--or stems up from, depending on your perspective--to where the cameras come from. Every Scape buys from Costco and uses software to improve the experience while Google has a specialized van covered in rims-to-roof-rack cameras.
That's also essential for scaling. Schoonmaker wants to expand "very quickly."
"We just raised our round of financing a couple months ago," said Schoonmaker. "One of the big reasons for that was to get this up quickly. There are about 300 different major metros across the world that we want to cover."
Making the Global Local
While the prosumer ambassadors will be adding the bulk of the new content to EveryScape, Schoonmaker is hoping users will contribute as well, to both their public and private experiences.
"That’s going to be key where we go next," he explained. "We want the world building the world, but we also want the world to use the world. You’ll see a lot of features like that where we try to engage users for a whole host of things, say, creating your own personal travel blog. We want to always be pushing the state of the art of what people can do and how to use it."
For now, EveryScape is taking smaller steps, but ones that make future options possible. The first is a Scape Memo that lets users tag the environment in private. After selecting the tool, the user can click anywhere in the virtual environment and add their note. They can then share up to 200 memos stored only in a URL that can be shared with friends or a chosen community.
In the public environment, World Tags let businesses add more data about their locale, ranging from an updated menu in text, a link to a file, or a video streamed directly in the EveryScape environment.
"We fully intend to replace the website of a restaurant," said Schoonmaker. "They don’t need one. World Tags are basically embedded icons. If you want to see a menu or a video of the chef talking about the specials for the night, it can all be embedded in the site. Our supposition is that if a picture is worth 1000 words, an experience is worth 10,000."
To make that more useful, EveryScape is improving its internal local search and also increasing it's integration with other services, providing a One-Click Meta Search to tie information from Yelp, geotagged photos from Flickr or videos from YouTube, and general information pulled from Yahoo.
That's not to say Schoonmaker thinks EveryScape will replace all those services--at least right now. He grants that there's a reason to occasionally begin with Yelp or City Search when looking for the top 5 Italian restaurants in San Francisco. Then, though, users might want to jump into EveryScape. In fact, Schoonmaker says the company is actively exploring official partnerships to package even more information into EveryScape.
"With virtual worlds you’re really there to entertain yourself, and the more the merrier," said Schoonmaker. "If you talk about mirror worlds used to inform people’s decision making, it’s the opposite. You give them all the information they need wrapped up on a silver platter. It’s a very human way to look for it."
Looking Down the Road
Not everyone would consider EveryScape a mirror world right now. Its static, mostly 2D images don't fit with some of the notions raised by 3D environments like Twinity. It's an step-by-step approach, though, says Schoonmaker.
"The content of EveryScape is a 3D world," he said. "That’s definitely the direction we’re going, with things like making it richer and richer and adding avatars. We believe it’s an incremental approach. If you try to build a 3D model of the world right now, it’s just too damn big. Over time without having to re-shoot the content, we can turn it into 3D content."
Even that change will likely be gradual. Just as Schoonmaker reasons that there's a place for the normal, 2D Web services when trying to pick a restaurant alongside browsing through EveryScape, there's a time and a place for 3D.
"I think for us it’s about the right tool for the job," he said. "There are certain use cases where having a 3D model is what you need. We’ll do that today. You’ll find certain parts of the world where you can turn it on and it’s more of a game-like experience. In others, you just don't need that as much."
For Schoonmaker now, though, in 2008?
"It's us getting out of the way."
