Vindigo

» see vindigo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Vindigo only worked in a city somebody had walked. The product was a database of american sidewalks. Restaurants with reviews and the number of blocks between you and them, movie times for the theater on the corner, museum listings, bar guides, and where to find a public bathroom.

There was no Ankara edition and there was never going to be one. That is not a complaint, it is the nature of the thing. The value was not in the software, which was small. It was that somebody had gone out and collected the ground truth of a specific list of specific cities, and kept collecting it.

Jason Devitt and David Joerg designed the first version in june 1999 after leaving trading jobs at D. E. Shaw. It ran on the Palm Pilot and later on Treos and Centros, and it spread the way things spread on those machines, hand to hand between people standing next to each other. Over its life it sold more than six million subscriptions.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sync ~

The mechanic that made it work is the hardest part to explain now. Vindigo never went and fetched anything. You put the Palm in its cradle and pressed the button. The day's data came down the serial cable next to your calendar. After that the device was complete on its own, and the guide answered underground, where a phone of that era would simply have failed.

It also had no idea where you were, because nothing did. You told it which two streets you were standing between and it counted blocks from there. That is the whole trick, and it was enough. A location app that predates location, built on a person typing in a cross street and a dataset walked by hand.

~ the funny part ~

The email went out in march 2009 and the homepage went blank, with about thirty people losing their jobs. Then the app kept working.

Users who kept putting the Palm in the cradle found that data still arrived. Movie times updated erratically into the middle of that year. Restaurant information went stale and the museum listings stopped moving, but the machinery on the far end had not been fully switched off and nobody appeared to be in a hurry to finish the job. One of them called it a zombie, which is the right word for software that has been declared dead and is still answering.

~ what it left ~

For-Side paid thirty six and a half million dollars in august 2004, at the moment when everyone could see that phones were about to matter and nobody could see which companies would matter on them. By 2009 the answer was in, and it was not a company shipping city data over a sync cable.

Google Maps did the same job for free in every city, and it never asked you to name a corner. What Vindigo proved first is that people would carry a guide to the physical world in their pocket and consult it standing on a street. That turned out to be one of the largest things anyone would ever be right about, and being right about it in 1999 with a Palm Pilot and no radio bought the company ten years.

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