Domain Name News reported today that Vancouver's own Reinvent Technology has relaunched Vancouver.com. Reinvent purchased their hometown domain in September of 2007 and has been hard at work developing this great geo domain.
The site has features that most users would be accustomed to finding at a geocentric website such as hotel reservations, restaurants, events and real estate. However there is one feature on Vancouver.com that really stood out to me, the City Tour section. This area features an animation of the world that quickly zooms in to a 3-D rendering of downtown Vancouver. The user can zoom in on specific buildings and when highlighted some of the building contain a textual description. As this is a beta version of the site, it still seems rough around the edges but I see a ton of potential in a slick interactive map like this.
Feedback on the new site to date has been mixed. There was originally a poll on the homepage and the results didn’t seem to convey that the users were getting what they were seeking with 44% of over 1,300 respondents said the site “needs more work”. Looks like Kevin Ham and his team are leaps and bounds ahead of Toronto.com though.
Rob Lewis
Rob is the President of Techvibes Media Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Techvibes.com.
His diverse background includes stints in International Trade Finance, Web Development, and Enterprise Software and he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University.
When not blogging on...[more]
