About the project
Imagine a web site that told you of when different things were going on in your area, with one system covering every area of the United Kingdom. It would also point to articles on the web describing what happened yesterday, this time last year or any other date.
Such a system will work because everybody can join in and add their own entries – like social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The system can be used to publicise everything from junior football to pop festivals. To make sure you only see what you want, use a topic to select the information you want to see.
The system is now up and running – and there is a very limited chance to buy a share in the business. The shares cost £50 each and there are just two hundred shares available – these will be sold on the first-come first-served basis. There are only one thousand shares in the business and so you could own something that could be worth a lot of money in the future.
The lucky few will have a chance to treble their share of the business by selling advertising in their area – this will be easy as the price of the adverts makes them the best deal imaginable to local businesses.
What makes WhereWhenWeb unique?
There is no other web site working anywhere in the world that lets the user do a precise search using date and location. We have developed a system that will allow thousands of users to access millions of records.
It is very easy to make an entry into the system and some businesses such as restaurants may want to make postings every day to announce their ‘specials’. If a business knows that such publicity works for them, they can introduce new ideas with more confidence. People who use search engines cannot do meaningful searches using a calendar date. This limitation is seldom mentioned and so nobody else has attempted to solve it. The lack of date-based searching has deterred people from posting date-based information.
The system will allow businesses to pay for adverts to appear and this will be controlled using regions and topics. The advertiser will know that the people seeing their advert are interested in the relevant product and they are enquiring about the relevant geographic area. This approach to hitting the right target is very difficult to achieve with most internet advertising. It is designed for small businesses and priced to be a very cost-effective option.
Our technology
The system uses a complex proximity algorithm to find the records which have data values which are close to the target of the query. This cannot be achieved with standard indexing because they effectively work on one field as the basis for their search. Even if an index is based on more than one field, it works by using the same index structure with a concatenation of the fields.
Some databases offer something called a geo-location index which permits a search to take place using latitude and longitude. These are implemented using alternating bits from the binary strings which represent the latitude and longitude. This approach works reasonably with most values, but does not guarantee that the closest records are found when they are in certain locations. There are efficiency issues when the data is not evenly distributed.
The algorithm used by this software uses date, latitude and longitude and works for all values. It does so more efficiently than other indexing algorithms as it has been designed to deal with data values whose frequency of occurrence are not uniformly distributed.
Plans for the future
The system has been developed and is now available for posting and querying. At the moment content is slowly building, anyone can add new information and events, letting others know about the system. The next phase is to use the income from this crowdsourcing request to improve the interface, develop apps and provide interfaces to Facebook and Twitter. We will also be taking advice from our users to see what features they think should be included.
Once the ‘new and improved’ version is available, we will be offering a chance to treble the their stakeholding to the two hundred people who have invested their money. They will be eligible to compete for the role of ‘project champion’ in a geographic area. This will involve selling advertising space to ten business in their area for £100 for the first year. Then ten businesses will select the topic for their advert and thus have ‘sole rights’ for the topic in their area for the first year.
The first investor in any area to attract this advertising will be given the role of ‘project champion’ and their stake-holding will be trebled. Once the advertisers have paid their fees, the potential for overseas and multi-lingual use will be investigated.
In the second year of operation, the costs of adverts will be raised and the number of topics will be increased. Project champions will receive a percentage (25%) of all income derived in their geographic area.
Thank you for reading. For further information check out http://wherewhenweb.com