Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve released the totally new Yourville to the public.  After many months of hard work and dedication, the day is here that we unveil our Beta release to the public. We’ve been doing private beta testing for the last few weeks, to hash out any issues or major bugs. We think we got everything, but if not, please let us know here. I cannot even begin express how excited we are to introduce you to this shiny, new Yourville.  The new Yourville is NOT a redesign, It’s a complete re-envisioning of the community, its features and its future.

Here’s the rundown of what the new Yourville is all about:

Yourville brings you and your neighbors together to share and discover reviews of the pros and cons of your experiences with local businesses, as well as meet new people in your area, and gain insight into other important information in, and around, your region. Think of Yourville as a Yelp for those of you that live in, or travel to awesome locations outside of your home country. We’re currently available in Costa Rica only, but expect us to launch new countries in the first half of 2010.

Who’s using Yourville, you ask?

• You might be an Expat working or going to school in Costa Rica.
• Or, you just decided to pull up stakes and move to an exotic destination and immerse yourself into the local culture.
• You could even be a traveler going on a backpacking trip throughout Latin America.

Either way, Yourville is for you. You can now get trusted recommendations and share your experiences of local businesses and service in Costa Rica (more countries launching soon).

Go to http://www.yourville.com to check us out for yourself. If you don’t live in Cost Rica, that’s ok. You can still add reviews for businesses that you experienced when you last visited, or look for recommendations for a great Hotel or Bar on your up coming visit. If you live in Costa Rica, then you know how important it is to get trusted recommendations for businesses. Whatever your status is, we hope you discover how useful and fun Yourville is.

We would like to thank Vesess for all of their help with this project. We couldn’t have made it this far without them. Additionally, we would like to thank all of our current members and beta testers for all of their patience and dedication.

If you have any questions, please email me  cmullins (at) yourville (dot) com or use our contact form.

In a effort to switch over to the new yourville.com, we’re currently doing some maintenance on our servers. The site will not be accessible for the next couple of hours.

Stay tuned for news about the new Yourville.com. We’ll be launching real soon.

Thanks,

Chris

Exciting news from Google.com: They’ve just added 54 new countries to Google Maps and more than doubled their coverage of Latin America and are now mapping three times as many countries in Asia as before. So if you’ve ever wanted to get the flavor of an energetic metropolis like Mexico City or scope out the relaxed vibe of a small island like Aruba, we’ve got you covered.

Here’s the full list of new countries:
Afghanistan, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Timor-Leste, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen

For more information, read: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/09/more-of-world-for-you-to-explore.html

A New website launched this week that allows tutors to teach language online. TalkBean.com allows students to set up an appointment directly with their language instructors. All lessons are performed live, using webcams. As a tutor, you can set your schedule to show times when you are available or show your students when you are online if you choose to go live, making yourself immediately available to teach. If you have any additional lesson material, this can be uploaded to TalkBean from your computer, during the lesson only. There’s also other ways in which students can leave memos for you or notes on your message board.

A recent report shares an apparent few drawbacks to the site: the registration process is rather cumbersome, and you’ll need to sign on as a tutor, which requires a 4-page sign up as well as your Paypal information. There’s also no good system to find other users, students, or tutors, so I’m at a loss as to how students and tutors can best network with each other. Adding a search bar, a ratings system and other checks to ensure that the tutors on the site are reliable and helpful, as well as the ability to upload lesson material independently of live webcam lessons, would bring a lot of value to TalkBean.

Who tutors on TalkBean? Whether you are a university stident looking for a side job, or a professional tutor, you can advertise yourself on the TalkBean marketplace to find the right students for your class. According to the website, you don’t need special training to be a tutor, Just your passion and the Internet.

Live Tutor allows you to instantly create your own space to teach knowledge and experience to ESL students. After registering as a tutor, you post your program for students to find and enroll. All lesson are performed live using a WebCam and HeadSet.

Tutors get paid from a system that automatically secures payments from students to their tutors and, thereby, allows seamless international payments. Students must pay the full lesson fee upfront to TalkBean and once the lesson is complete. Lesson fee is deposited to the tutor’s TalkBean account as cyber money, which can be
withdrawn and sent to tutor’s bank account upon request.

Similar services include Grockit, LessonBites, Tutorom and xLingo.

Well, it’s been a little over a month since Yourville.com was
launched and we’re ecstatic about our response. Our original
Yourville concept was to design and implement a website that
would bring expats in Costa Rica and expat wannabees together
in a viral community that would enable our members to stay in
touch with friends and families while they make new acquaintances
online. At this writing, we have surpassed our goals.

Here’s a breakdown of our present Yourville membership:

36.0% Live in Costa Rica
45.2% Live in the U.S.
18.8% Live in the Rest of the World

69.1% Are Male
30.9% Are Female

15.0% Are age 18-34
25.0% Are age 34-50
60.0% Are age 50-77

It seems, from our calculations, that a vast majority of our members
50 years of age and above have sought and/or or seeking a Tico/Tica
type of life in Costa Rica. It appears to be a glowing testimony to
the growing popularity of Costa Rica and its special allure and as a
final venue for the adventurous and those seeking the pura vida experience.

We finally went live with the Beta version of Yourville this morning. Our testing period went well and we received some great feedback from our test group. Now it’s time to evangelize and spread the word of the benefits of yourville. Thanks to everyone who has helped out so far with this project. We would like to invite all current expats, expat wannabes and curiosity seekers alike to give yourville a spin. If you have questions about yourville please feel free to contact us.

As we get closer to launching Yourville to the public. And, fully anticipate the site to not perform 100% all the time and or change on a daily basis. Does it matter if we proclaim ourselves to be in Alpha phase or does the general web public really care? I often see websites that carry a beta tagline with their logo for months or even a year. I generally don’t think any differently if the site is in beta or not. If the site performs well and keeps me interested then great. If the site doesn’t perform well, I’m normally pretty forgiving and assume that the site owners are aware of the problem and are working on it. Does anyone have an opinion on this? As it stands for now, we plan on letting our visitors and members know that we are a growing site and fully expect that the site will change as our community grows and voices their needs. I don’t suspect adding Alpha or Beta to all of logos will make much of a difference to anyone.

In the process of creating a new web community, we wanted to start a blog to share our excitement and adventures with our users, clients, family and friends. In the coming days, we will be posting numerous entries about our newly found research, the applications we’ll be building, our startup process, what we hope to accomplish, and to document the planning, design, coding and marketing of this new website.

In today’s Web environment you don’t have to have a computer science degree (although helpful) to build a successful web application that will serve the needs of millions of users. This blog’s content will be coming from the perspective, not of technologists but, instead, passionate individuals who want to build the tools that will raise communication value among like-minded audiences worldwide.

Stay tuned, we hope you’ll like it.