September 17 2007

Dial Directions Expands Coverage, Provides Event Directions

Nick Gonzalez

12 comments »

Dial Directions is a mobile directions service that delivers point to point directions to your mobile phone. To get directions to any location, you dial d-i-r-e-c-t-i-o-n-s (347-328-4667), say where you are, where you want to go, and get directions between the two points sent to your mobile phone via SMS. Their eventual plans for monetization include inserting small text ads into the SMS messages.

Today Dial Directions is announcing national coverage and extending their mobile directions platform to deliver directions on demand for any event.

While Dial Directions was already available in the San Francisco Bay area, and the greater metro areas of New York and Los Angeles, they are now expanding to include: Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Sacramento, San Diego and Washington, D.C.

The other announcement, event directions, has been available upon special request (Like TechCrunch 9), but is now opened up to self-service. Now anyone can list a keyword and address for an event with Dial Directions. Attendees can get directions to an event by calling and asking for the event by title. The service is now live for TechCrunch 40. All you need to do is call in and say “TechCruch”.

In addition to directions, the service gives event details, such as date and time. Later on, organizers will be able to record a greeting that callers will hear. Event listings also have a grace period which will announce the details for upcoming events and tell callers if events have passed.

This adds a third option to the list of ways to request directions supported by calling into Dial Directions. The other two service options find directions by point or the nearest location of a chain store. Dial Directions plans on adding more options in the future. There are several other richer mobile directions options including TellMe, Yahoo, and Google’s mobile applications. However, Dial Directions is banking on their feature set and accessibility on any phone that can make a call as a strong competitive advantage.

Sphere It

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coco

September 17th, 2007 at 3:29 am

hmm,difficult to understand.
Piers

September 17th, 2007 at 3:59 am

All you need to do is call in and say “TechCruch”

Is that a deliberate typo?
Json

September 17th, 2007 at 4:57 am

“What city are you starting from?”

“Sacramento, California.”

“What event are you looking for?”

“TechCrunch 40.”

“Say that again?”

“TechCrunch 40.”

“Say that again?”

“TechCrunch40.”

“Say that again?”

“@$@#*& ##!@##@#!!!!!”

“Say that again?”
Derrick

September 17th, 2007 at 5:22 am

@Piers

He must have typed the entry too fast to get the title of the blog wrong.
Tuyen

September 17th, 2007 at 5:22 am

@Json,

TechCrunch 40 was originally only published as a San Francisco Bay Area event (which is why it wouldn’t recognize “Sacramento”). However, that’s probably shortsighted as TechCrunch 40 might be drawing attendees from Sacto and further. So we’ll add the event to the other California regions, too. In the meantime, just ask for it from one of the 200+ cities in the Bay Area (e.g. San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, Burlingame, Santa Rosa, Fremont, Oakland, Berkeley, etc). Hope that helps a bit.

Cheers,

Tuyen
tuyen@dialdirections.com
www.dialdirections.com
Json

September 17th, 2007 at 5:35 am

@ Tuyen

Aww, no prob. I was just having some fun. I tried your service with some local directions and found it to be pretty darn nifty.

Hell, I should feel lucky simply because you included Sacramento in your beta test. It’s not often that “Sacramento” and “beta” find themselves in the same sentence together.
Steve

September 17th, 2007 at 7:20 am

Tuyen,

Cool service. How are you going to differentiate this when navigation systems become cheaper and more standard in new cars? Maybe you’ll cash out before this happens, but I was just curious to see what you thought.
ely

September 17th, 2007 at 9:44 am

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Sin Jin

September 17th, 2007 at 11:57 am

cool app now but what happens when cell phones start being loaded with GPS features?
Sai

September 17th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

have nyone tried 904-358-3333?
Tuyen

September 17th, 2007 at 8:54 pm

@Steve - Thanks! In addition to Dial Directions as a consumer service, we are also a speech-enabled directions mobile platform. We believe speech is a natural, intuitive interface that requires zero learning curve, and is well suited for most common folk (like yours truly)! Our spoken location based services approach may complement navigation systems, whether that’s your cell phone or an in-car device. Speaking your destination can be a lot easier than punching keys or scrolling through lists to identify your destination. We expect to be working closely with leading in-car solutions as they become more prevalent across the spectrum of new cars.

@Sin Jin - Thanks! Hope you don’t mind me throwing some stats around. According to Jupiter Research, currently only about 5 percent of the 220 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S. own smart phones or voice-enabled PDAs. Even if that percentage doubles, there’s still a lot of us with plain ‘ol phones. Dial Directions is consumer-friendly for the other 90% of everyday users: no downloads required, no monthly Internet plan, no typing in text, no limitations on hardware phone model, and plus we support all carriers. Similar to my chat with @Steve, even if phones have GPS features, you still need an easy, no-nonsense way to select your destination — definitely pointing to usefulness of multi-modal approach, yes?

@Sai - Hi, I think the service you note is an example of free Directory Assistance (DA). Dial Directions is not DA — and we deliver something no (free) DA can do today: point-to-point directions to an address or intersection, nearest business chain and now posted local events. More is coming…
Sabir Khan

September 19th, 2007 at 1:05 am

Hi

Is it just a coincidence, me & a friend , Tarun Jain are very much working on similar lines, to start Dial Direction kind of services, Ours is called Fone a Friend.

We are fine tuning the plan as of now & would be looking for VC’s when its done, actually Tarun posted the link for Dial Directions via email,
How would it be that we joined hands & start the service in India,
You can also Outsource Dial Directions In India, which would be cheaper then having the operation base in America,

Sabir