Scrolling down your favourite street

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

A temporary lull in business spurred a Ponsonby graphics design company to develop what is fast becoming a lucrative internet franchise.

"I had a little bit of a slow period and the mind starts ticking," said Matthew Hart, proprietor of the Hart Department. "I came up with the idea of putting our local community online but I thought: how can I do this uniquely?"

His brainwave was to combine scores of photos of individual shops and businesses in Ponsonby Rd into two long panoramas covering each side of the street.

The panoramas became the centrepiece of a community-based advertising website at www.ponsonbyroad.co.nz where visitors could scroll down the length of the road and click on links to advertisers' sites as they passed by.

The idea caught on. Two years after the first site went live, about 200 of the 500 to 600 businesses in Ponsonby Rd are paying customers, each spending anywhere between $100 and $3500 on a linked website.

In the same period, Hart's business has grown from four to 12 employees and he has formed a company, Roadworks Online, to exploit the "Streetscroll" concept.

The first franchisee was the Heart of the City business group, which represents 1400 central Auckland retailers. The group paid Roadworks $50,000 to design Streetscroll sites for the Queen St, High St and Viaduct areas, as well as a hub site at www.hotcity.co.nz.

Roadworks has also created Streetscroll sites for the Karangahape Rd and Newmarket areas.

Last year Roadworks acquired an international dimension when a United States company, 4am, asked permission to create a Streetscroll site for Los Gatos, a community near Silicon Valley. The site is now running as a test bed for wider US exploitation.



Roadworks' next step will be to set up a site for Islington in London.

Roadworks

ponsonbyroad.co.nz

Hotcity

losgatos.streetscroll.com