Mike Burns co-founded “Fuel Industries”:http://www.fuelindustries.com/ in 1999 and has since led its evolution into one of North America’s most advanced online branded entertainment agencies. Fuel has created console-quality online games, worlds, viral campaigns and digital toys for major brands throughout Canada and the U.S., and has partnered with some of the world’s largest advertising agencies to help them navigate the branded entertainment landscape.
Burns has been recognized numerous times for his creative approach to game development, and has been the recipient of several industry awards, including being named one of the Top 40 Entrepreneurs under 40 by the Ottawa Business Journal. Over the past year, Fuel has doubled in size to over 85 employees, and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
*One Degree: Fuel Industries has managed to build quite a reputation for high impact web sites and viral campaigns – Can you tell us a little about how you got to where you are now?*
When we started Fuel seven years ago, we wanted to deliver the web applications and interactive sites that most other Canadian firms weren’t able to. We knew that web-based gaming was going to be huge in the future, and we started developing that side of our practice about five years ago. In the past few years when technology had caught up with consumer demand, we were ready to capitalize on it while other agencies were playing catch-up. Advergaming is only a part of what we do, but it’s been a major part of what has driven our reputation over the past few years.
*One Degree: What comes first – the technology or the insight?*
Month: September 2006
The Web has overtaken almost all aspects of my own personal information gathering. I haven’t been to a library in years, the white pages sits in a closet, and I just don’t own any maps anymore. But the Yellow Pages still gets well thumbed. For some reason, finding local resources online can be frustrating. Even with resources like “Google Local”:http://local.google.com/ and “toronto.com”:http://www.toronto.com/, if I need to find a plumber in Toronto the Yellow Pages is better than the Web.
But now “Yellowpages.ca”:http://www.yellowpages.ca/ has redesigned and so “Ken”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/ken-schafer asked me to take a look at the experience.
The home page is clear and concise allowing for multiple ways to search.
The first search field allows you to enter a business name, category or phone number. What’s nice is the system figures out what you are looking for. That means searching for “2 Brother’s Plumbers”, “Plumber”, “drain repair” or “416-XXX-XXXX” will get me good results.
I can search geographically by entering city, province or postal. What is nice about this, is the system handles the complexity, you enter terms that are natural to you and the system figures it out. Too many sites hoist complexity back at the user.
Results are great.
It allows you to easily browse listings. Listings have graphics, typically company logos, and some replicate the ad from the Yellow Pages. This allows for good visual recognition and comprehension. That is one of the benefits of the paper version of YP, when I look at a page I can scan it for a listing that fits my needs. They haven’t replicated that experience but have brought the right aspects of it over to their site.
When you are in a listing it gives you all the information you would need (address, phone, description map etc.).
It also gives you a screenshot of the home page of the company’s Web site (if available) which is a great idea. I was able to evaluate if I wanted to visit the company’s site before leaving Yellowpages.ca. A few search engines like Yahoo and Ask.com have begun doing site thumbnails as a way of finding search results and it works well.