Gadgets, gizmos, and tools to help make you more productive in business

Are you moving in to a new neighbourhood? And you got yourself a street directory book, only to find out that the content is outdated? There is a better way to get familiar with your new neighbourhood better. Why not try to find them with AskCity?

AskCity is actually the result of collaboration between Ask.com and CitySearch with the focus on helping users to have a better experience while doing online search for certain information on anything they want to know about and can get locally.

It currently provides four different types of search and is good if you are looking for Businesses, Events, Movies and Maps & Directions. For example, if you're looking for a carpet cleaning service provider in your area, or anywhere around the country, all you need to do is simply make the queries in the search box provided, and submit some details on the location you're looking for - an address, street name, city, neighborhood or a zip code.

If any of the particular search items grabs your attention, you can even pin it on the map for future references. But that's not the only thing you can do, because there's a set of tools available under the map pane, for you to make notes on the map.

What I found to be most attractive about AskCity is its ability to combine a sense of direction when we do any local search.

To get an idea of what information people have been looking for at AskCity, you might want to check this out.

If you are unsure of any certain location on the map, you might need to use the light bulb, it's one of AskCity tools which allows you to get an exact location on the map.

With the extensive amount of data that CitySearch has been archiving for more than 10 years, this would be a very useful tool to get all the vital information of your new neighbourhood. Local search and online mapping service is nothing new. This article from Techcrunch recently might give you some idea about how stiff the competition is among the online mapping services. Although YellowPages for local searches already exist, but I don't think you will ever consider using them after you have tried this one.

But still there's nothing unusual about AskCity: SearchViews has recently featured an article about the trends in searching for local information. It reveals that 63% of all US Internet users (in other words, 109 million people) go online to look for local information. And it so happens that Ask Network only gets 2.7% out of the total local searches volume. That's obviously very low if compared to Google and Yahoo, who hold shares of 29.8% and 29.2% respectively. Anyway, I suspect that the popularity of AskCity will bypass other online mapping tools, thanks to their unique features and also impressive amount of information you can find out about your area. AskCity Launches. It's Cool.