Hi. I'm one of the Povo people. We're trying to build a new kind of local guide, where people can contribute information (this isn't new) but also contribute the WAYS in which they find and search for things. On Povo, you can enter information about the parking garages in your area. But you could also build a search engine to let people ask "Where can I park for 2 hours near the South End for less than $10?". This "user generated functionality" can be collaboratively evolved over time. You might add the ability to account for Red Sox games, or oversized vehicles, etc. Anyhow, more later, but thanks for checking out Povo.
Many people have asked for some background of the people who started Povo, so although I don't love web site bio's, here it is for all its worth.
I'm a co-founder of Povo along with
~hasty. Povo was spun out of
Arts Alliance Labs, a small company I started in association with
Arts Alliance Ventures to build core technologies for a set of digital media companies. That platform turned out to be useful for everything from running a digital cinema network to running the online volunteer systems (basically all the non-static, non-contribution web stuff) for JohnKerry.com in 2004. Before that, I was CTO and cofounder of PeoplePC, a division of Earthlink. I was previously CTO and cofounder of Firefly, where I helped develop personalization technologies including
collaborative filtering (Wikipedia) and the Open Profiling Standard, which has evolved into
P3P (Wikipedia) and attempts to protect users' privacy online. Following Microsoft's acquisition of Firefly, I joined Microsoft as the lead architect and developer for Microsoft's Passport product. I have bachelors and masters degrees from MIT.