Travis Chow is the founder of Neighboroo. He has a M.S. in Computer Science and has been involved in many facets of the software and internet services industries for almost a decade, from working in big giants like Microsoft all the way down to helping run a small analytics consulting firm. Has loves maps, trends, design, and has been a computer geek since his brother bought a Atari 800 when he was in 4th grade.

What's the story behind Neighboroo?

Neighboroo started about a year ago as a hobby collecting trends around the nation. I’ve always been fascinated with trends and patterns from the abstraction of philosophy all the way to data mining. I became restless at a software sales job, and ran the idea by a really smart physicist friend. We explored different ways of visualizing these trends, and I got really excited about sharing it with the rest of the world. I was in between jobs and decided to focus on this full-time. Neighboroo became a small band of data geeks crunching numbers day and night. After a lot of caffeine, emails and take out food, we launched the service two weeks ago. We currently use Google Maps and a lot of custom source code to render our Information Maps. I am a big believer in minimalist design, and we were committed from day one to keep things simple and easy.

A service like Zillow is used for people interested in buying or selling homes. What is the purpose of Neighboroo?

At a conference in July, the CEO of Zillow revealed from an internal survey that almost half of their traffic comes from voyeurism. We think people are just hungry for information and get a kick out of exploring meaningful trends. Besides keeping with the Joneses, location-based trends are very useful in making real estate decision whether if you are buying a home, renting an apartment or opening a new business. In addition, trend information is valuable in consumer marketing and any study in constituency. Just recently, I read a blog about using Neighboroo to help a church understand its constituents. That’s what Neighboroo is about. It’s simply a place to lookup local and national trends open to anyone with a browser.

If the service becomes popular, how do you plan on staying ahead of competition?

We hope people find it as fascinating as we do. Above all, we hope our users take the information and apply it. The top request we have received so far is to offer more “zoom” into our Information Maps. Also, users want more granularity and more types of data. We also received request for more coverage, e.g. Canada. We are currently doing quality assurance before rolling out features that will answer a lot of these requests. Our users will see them soon. Another service we are very excited about is our Guroo Spaces program which will allow trend experts share their findings with anybody who’s interested.

We’ve heard a lot of people calling us a “real estate mashup” and have received great feedback from realtors and brokers. I suppose we are since our Information Maps help people make real estate decisions. We at Neighboroo just want to keep it open to any industry that find the service useful. We don’t compete with realtors, consultants or anybody who knows a lot more about the details of a specific area. I suppose our direct competition are companies who offer trend information (a.k.a. “neighborhood information”). Many offer great value with superior analytics and granularity, but some just repackage government data for a hefty price. Neighboroo’s mission is to make it as accessible as possible by keeping it simple and available. To achieve this, user experience is our top priority, and we make partnerships that allow us to keep it open and free.