 This entry refers to a departed business that has closed or left town. All information here is for historical reference only. |
R.I.P.: www.davis411.com
The website people used to go to for Davis resturant/yellowpages-esque information before the Davis Wiki came about. Doing a google search on it will turn up many sites that still link to it. However, it had a few things the Wiki lacks, such as an effective book trading system — but this is due largely to the fact that the wiki and the old 411 site had very different goals.
Davis411 was a for-profit company with an actual office right next to Delta of Venus. The site had a bunch of businesses listed and their hours, as well as an active classifieds listing. Companies could pay the Davis411 company some sum of money to have more information about their business listed, and a couple of businesses actually had complete menus on there. The Davis411 folks attempted to move their Davis-centric business portal to other cities via their corporate name of Citi411.
Davis411 was founded by UCD Computer Science student Howard Hsu. Stanley Mimoto, also an UC Davis student, helped evolve the business into "Citi411".
Was Davis411 good for businesses? Many businesses (to this day!) have little "Davis411" stickers in their windows, presumably because they paid the site to have their business listed on there. The businesses had a much safer bet with Davis411 than they ever would with Davis Wiki — after all, the users of this site control the information, whereas Davis411 was a business-centric site with customer comments as only an afterthought.
The only real similarity between Davis Wiki and Davis411 is the fact you can find some of the same information here as you could there. Davis Wiki's aim is to become a large body of general information relating to Davis in many ways, whereas Davis411 was a glorified business listing site.
Many of the old davis411 pages can still be accessed via its Internet Archive entries.
As of May 2005 it appears the domain was snatched up by someone in Moscow and the site's static html front page was restored from archive.org. (e.g. someone's trying to sell the site)
- It must be think one of Mike's relatives in is some sort of elaborate blackmail scheme because Mike owes them money.
Nowadays there are sites such as inDavis.com and Davis Online that hope to take the place of the former Davis411 by providing a very similar site structure.
