Vindigo No Longer Free
Vindigo is a service that provides city guides, movie listings, and restaurant reviews. Until now, it was free for Palm OS users. Today, Vindigo 2.0 was launched and it costs $25 for a one year subscription. Also new in this version are user ratings of restaurants, Metacritic's summaries of movie reviews, color maps, and more. The service now has guides for 23 major U.S. cities and London.
A subscription includes unlimited access to all these cities, and free updates every time the Handheld is HotSynced.
Until this version, the service was supported by showing advertising to users. However, advertising revenues have dropped over the last year and the company was forced to begin charging users. The company has charged for the Pocket PC version for some time and was pleased with the results. It still includes advertising.
Vindigo no longer includes Zagat restaurant guides. These are, however, available from LandWare.
The company also offers a very limited version called Vindigo Lite. This contains only names and addresses of some leading restaurants in one city of the user's choice, as well as movie showtimes. For example, Vindigo 2.0 lists over 3,000 restaurants, but Vindigo Lite contains only 100, without reviews or ratings. It is included with the demo.
Vindigo works on any handheld running Palm OS 3 or higher. Memory requirements differ by city and by the number of channels subscribed to within a city. In order to subscribe to all available channels within a city, Vindigo recommends that users have between 600K and 1000K available. No form of external memory card is supported.
A 30-day free trial is available.
Thanks to Dennis for the tip. -Ed
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RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
You said it yourself. You've never used it.
I've been living in NYC for 2 years and I can't live without it. I've even emailed them in the oast ASKING them to take money to insure that they won't go under.
Everyone I know that has a palm PDA uses vindigo.
$20 a year would be perfect, but $25 a year is OK.
While I agree that vindigo is not for everyone, those who use it find it to be a must-have app for the palm
Ophir Prusak
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
$25 is not a lot for business users, which is where the products market firmly lies.
If it included more European cities I'd happily pay the money. I'll see how much I miss it on my next trip to London though before shelling out.
Regards,
Nick
ESSENTIAL
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
I am a big fan of Vindigo, but not for 25 with bad reviews.
\\ AC
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
For traveling, I could see it as a benefit, as well. Twenty-five dollars doesn't seem like a lot to me for the amount of information I get right at my fingertips, wherever I go. About $2.00 a month for all this.
The downside, as others have mentioned, is the memory requirements. It'd be nice to see the application utilize external memory options.
For those who haven't tried it, I recommend they do.
True, it's not an application for people who do not live in the selected cities, nor those who aren't frequent travelers. But then, I don't think those are the target market.
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
New York. When Vindago replaced Zagat, the fact that they were free still made
them worth using. But at least for restaurant information, Vindago at $25.00 is
worth less than Zagat's for $30.00.
RE: Vindigo soon will be Vindigone
I love vindigo.. and i will miss it. am i going to pay $25 a year. the answer is NO, i will not. I have Zagat on my pda, so I wont need the resturant listing from vindigo. Movies - for one thing, i dont watch movie that often, even if i do, i can always call 777-film, or from using avango, i can access it throught yahoo.com... one think i know i will miss is the shops, the stores.. living in New York City, we have so many department stores alll over... that comes in handle alot. its like a yellow page.
oh well, looks like i'm going to be getting 1000k of pda space. what should i use it for????
jlo
Oh well, I'll never learn
It's going to be really tough to decide whether to pay or give it up. Looks like I've got a month to do so.
Oh, and $25 a year is really reasonable (in fact, it's $19.95 until the end of March). It's not like they're charging $25 a month. Or even $10 a month. This boils down to about $2 a month, which is pretty cheap as far as subscription services go.
--------------------------------------
PIC Moderator: Software forum
"Well, if it isn't the leader of the wiener patrol, boning up on his nerd lessons"
RE: Oh well, I'll never learn
excellent!
It always amazes me that folks feel that everything should be free. I like (nay, love) the fact that they tried to make it free by using ads, but if they are losing money, it is definately a program i would pay for. I hope that they can survive.
nategall says "blah!"
RE: Oh well, I'll never learn
Charge for the software and leave the service free.
RE: Oh well, I'll never learn
So, by this statement, we should all be able to buy a car and get free maintenance for the life of the car.
IMHO, not a very good business model.
RE: Oh well, I'll never learn
> lot of money.
Contrary to popular belief where? Maybe in cities not available to Vindigo's services. I'd say that the majority of residents in the listed major (if not, popular) cities would certainly agree that $25 is reasonable.
And to every rule there are exceptions, because there will be those that think it's not worth the amount. However, I'm referring to (but, not speaking for) the majority of people in these cities, and perhaps Vindigo thinks the same. Evidently, Vindigo is now more of a luxury, than a necessity for avid Palm users.
Is avantgo next???
RE: Is avantgo next???
RE: Is avantgo next???
RE: Is avantgo next???
------------------------
Mario
CLIE Moderator
http://www.geocities.com/msmasitti
RE: Is avantgo next???
Thanks for the wonderful feedback. Since most users find the service indispensable, soon we will start charging for the service based on the number of channels downloaded.
And we know you will pay for our service. We will add more ads and annoying channel previews and we will ensure that your user data is sold to maximize the Avantgo experience.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
RE: Is avantgo next???
bimmer
RE: Is avantgo next???
---
If you sing in french while hopping on one foot, the evil birds won't come out of your bathroom mirror.
Vindigo: still a business like everyone else
It was going to happen sooner than later
I think they need to re-examine their fees and bring it down a tad.
I'm in, but...
As an avid Vindigo user (I live in New York where it's essential and have used it in Boston, D.C. and L.A.), I am definately going to pay the $25 for the service. The amazing thing is just how much they have added to this already great service - Museum information, Shecky reviews (the best nightlife guide there is), and Metacritic reviews (I used to have the Avantgo channel for this). The only problem/missing feature is VFS awareness as this is a definate memory hog. From the website:
"Vindigo memory requirements differ by city and by the number of channels you have subscribed to within a city. In order to subscribe to all available channels within a city, we recommend that you have between 600K – 1000K available.If you are downloading multiple cities, you can lower the minimum memory requirement by 100K per city for each additional city beyond the first. Memory cards, storage cards, flash memory, and memory sticks are not supported."
Otherwise, an outstanding product if you live in one of their 23 cities. Here's the list since I didn't see it posted elsewhere.
Atlanta
Austin
Boston
Brooklyn
Chicago
Dallas
Denver
Fort Worth
Houston
Las Vegas
London
Los Angeles
Greater LA (Burbank,
Glendale and Pasadena)
Miami
New York
Orlando
Philadelphia
Portland, OR
San Diego
San Francisco
San Jose
Seattle
Twin Cities
Washington, DC
Later.
E
RE: I'm in, but...
RE: I'm in, but...
RE: I'm in, but...
I'm out.....
As for movies, geez, what ISN'T playing at the local 100-theatre Gargantuan Movie Plex? Movie reviews? I'll know what sucks from water cooler chit-chat soon enough. Other than that, if I travelled, well, I still wouldn't subscribe, but I can see why some with $25 burning a hole in their pockets might.
Haha
And oooh it includes Shecky's NYC guide, which apparently is for gays/lesbians, since those are the only kinds of bars the pqa version returns. or maybe every bar in nyc is gay. not that there's anything wrong with that.
The only thing that would make this funnier would be if vindigo went public before crapping out.
RE: Haha
What about cable TV--that's not free, and it carries ads.
Wall Street Journal online--one of the most successful commercial sites on the net. Carries ads.
You ride the subway, pay your $1.50, get inside--ADS!!
Go to a baseball game, pay for your ticket, get to your seat...Hey! What's that next to the scoreboard?? An ad?
There's nothing wrong with including ads in services that are not free.
RE: Haha
RE: Haha
steep pricing
A relatively short while ago Vindigo only occupied 730+ K of memory whereas now, with the jump in the complexity of content, the memory requirement has jumped to around 1200k.
Also, in response to a couple of posts below regarding Vindigo's moving from a free service to a subscription service, I agree with the poster who suggests that Vindigo charge for its software, not its content. Afterall, Vindigo merely acts as a content aggragator and creates no real content of its own. The service gathers information from other sources (Time Out New York for example) and organizes it for its users. Zagat's realized this and bailed out on Vindigo at the end of last year.
Had Vindigo begun as a paid subscription service, I doubt we would all be having this conversation. It is incredibly difficult for sites/services to move from free to paid subscriptions without experiencing user abandonment. I doubt that the Pocket PC users (who've paid from the onset) are upset about having to pay.
Given that Vindigo has changed its content providers recently, it seems that the most responsible thing it can do for its users is to continue to focus on software without overbuilding it resulting in bloat.
The dramatic increase in size may result in Vindigo user dissatisfaction faster than the new pricing model. Vindigo needs to address memory card usage straight away.
While the pricing represents a steep jump, $2.08 per month is pretty cheap, while sacrificing memory is not.
RE: steep pricing
Well, I hope we wouldn't.
If Vindigo began as a paid service, do you think ED would post an article on 3/18/02 about Vindigo becoming a paid service?
RE: steep pricing
The problem for Vindigo (and many, many other companies) is that after creating an environment where the diminshed the value of the content they offered by not charging, they then tried to switch to paid subscription service for users in the habit of receiving the same information for free.
Offering content for free tends to make users less inclined to pay for it because the content provider has diminshed the perception that its content is exclusive or important enough for subscription becuase it was initially free.
best, j.
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Vindigo soon will be Vindigone