PRESS CENTER
NEWS ANNOUNCEMENTDoes Motorsports Racing Need Its Own Search Engine?Boston, Massachusetts, June 16, 2008 - If you ask that question to the management of Yabutz - a search engine in its final development and test stages that is dedicated exclusively to "worldwide" motorsports racing, they'd say, 'Yes, of course!' With fingers crossed."Search is the fastest-growing, and in many cases one of the most useful tools on the Internet," states Alan Walker, V.P. of Technology for Yabutz, which plans to launch this October. "Without search abilities, the Internet doesn't work. Life without Google - think about that for awhile." The genesis for Yabutz was straightforward, as are many such Internet endeavors: Find an industry that is underserved; learn its complexities (or lack thereof) and its underlying operational aspects; determine its market size; spend a few hundred thousand dollars deploying technology and staff resources; develop a business plan to make it all worthwhile. Yabutz is new, but it's not a start-up in the traditional sense. This is not its management team's first Internet exploit. The company behind Yabutz was founded in 1995 to develop software and hardware solutions for the telephone industry - an industry that was struggling with how best to provide Internet-related services to their land-line customers. The company and its four founding members still operate the entity to this day. Over the years the company has made strategic investments in various technology start-ups. One in particular - where Yabutz' origins can be traced - was a web-hosting company that had a client who operated all of NASCAR's development series websites. It's a long story from there to here, and some four years later, needless to say a group within the company had an idea. Would the racing industry benefit from an online centralized procurement and information source? In that, many manufacturers that produce high-performance racing parts, for example, do so for various racing segments - brakes for racecars as well for motorcycles, and so on; with each racing segment having its own trade shows, magazines, websites, buyers guides and online directories, all pretty much fragmented rarely intersecting. Not to mention, there are some great, specialized companies (particularly in the advanced engineering field) serving the "racing" community that go unnoticed or are impossible to locate. So, why not provide a nearly $20 billion decentralized racing industry a centralized, online destination where all racing segments could quickly find suppliers whenever they wanted, then incorporate features that all might find useful - if Google could "corral" the Internet why not... As more and more high-profile websites - principally those of TV broadcasters continue to broaden their "racing" coverage - from F1 to Motocross, and race tracks continue to expand their weekend events, stockcars to drifting, why not an online racing venue? Or so went the theory. Originally titled Motosourcing, and after much consternation, Yabutz was funded by the partners in October 2007, a year from its planned October 2008 launch. Although NASCAR racing was the management teams' source for early research, to become a true "value-proposition" Yabutz had to go beyond just being a search engine for stockcars. So, staff fanned out all over the globe - well, almost. One group was assigned to Formula One, another to Indy, one to drifting, one to drag-racing, one to dirt-racing (both on and off road) one to various motorcycle series, and so on and so on. Six months of research produced mounds of pulp (research papers), that were then indexed and dissected. The result was Yabutz. Yabutz will be a free service for companies that offer products and services to the racing industry, and for professional and amateur motorsports drivers, teams and parts-procurement staff within the racing industry in need of high-performance parts, engineering services, shop equipment, tools, education and then some. Yabutz will not be a "swap-meet" for used parts, or a classified for selling unwanted stuff, but rather a search tool dedicated exclusively to worldwide motorsports racing, its competitors and suppliers. Yabutz will provide online services like Track Maps, which list nearly 1,000 tracks in the U.S. and Canada. The service will offer precise directions and maps to these tracks, and will include useful information such fuel prices (updated daily) and road services along the route. Yabutz racing news, from media outlets around the world, will offer racing stories that effect race teams, their sponsors and manufacturers, regardless of the series. Yabutz is clearly a work in progress, "fluid" as the techno geeks that work on it like to say. It will develop and mature over time, adding and deleting services, testing ideas that drivers, teams and others from around the world provide to create new resources. But one thing is for certain - as the Internet continues to expand, without bounds, and information becomes more complex and far reaching, specialized search tools such as Yabutz will become integral components of the online world. "Of course we're all optimistic about Yabutz' success," said Alan Walker, "but we still haven't figured out how to make money from it - which is not unusual given the company's lineage. When you develop technology that has never been attempted or proven, customers don't line up to see geewiz stuff, particularly the ultra-conservative telco industry. This company has historically developed technology solutions that don't produce revenue for years - in some cases, not for a decade, if ever. I've been with the company since its inception in 1995 - with the advent of Yabutz I'm sure to have a job for at least another decade." Contact media@yabutz.com |